A Dance Through Time, by Ella Rosenblatt

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

"These poems can be traced back to a quirk of Providence, RI: the sidewalk offerings. Boxes can be found on most blocks, but they are rarely filled with trash. I have found many gems—issues of literary magazines, my bedside lamp, various office supplies, a couch, and a romance novel, A Dance Through Time, by Lynn Kurland.

A Dance Through Time provided exactly what I needed to start a blackout poem project: pages with words to cross out, cut up, smear, spit on, etc. Fatigued by quarantine and zoom calls, I needed a screen-free way to write. Black out poems were the perfect solution. I erased, redacted, concealed, and discovered, and later, joyfully recopied the remains.

The book centers around a woman who travels back in time (unclear how far) and lives out sexual fantasies with an abusive British man. I wasn’t surprised to find fraught gender and relationship dynamics, but I was struck by moments of exploitation juxtaposed with interactions between humans and nature. Perhaps it was my own selective marks on the pages, but the coexistence of environmental imagery and blurry sexual consent did not strike me as an accident. My erasures revealed a parallel between these forms of exploitation, demands, fraught coexistence."

—Ella Rosenblatt

Ella is designer/artist/educator/writer currently pursuing an MFA in Graphic Design at CalArts. She previously studied Art History and Science, Technology, and Society at Brown University, focusing on linguistics and art/writing practice.