Ashley Howell, burning, breaking, building,
South Broadway Press, 2026
76 pages, ISBN 978-1-7350355-5-0.
Reviewed by Matt Hohner.
The erasure or blackout form is one technique that challenges the very heart of writing and language itself—who owns it—and poses the challenge as both question and answer of what can we do with a text that has already been written in order to make it new using only the words in the text itself. Notable examples are the monumental A Humument by Tom Phillips, in which the poet applies original, painted and drawn images, both abstract and representative, directly on a printed volume of text to create a poem on every page using dazzling visual images where there was once only prose. Another masterful use of erasure or blackout poetry in Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout, in which the poet uses the New Nork Times as his foundational text to make new poems out of the news, in which the news becomes poetry, subverting William Carlos Williams’s famous passage from “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower:” It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there. We also have the gift of Tracy K. Smith’s brilliant and ever-timely “Declaration,” in which she uses the American Declaration of Independence to call attention to who, exactly, is being declared independent and free, at the constituted expense of enslaved Africans. In the case of Smith’s poem, the poet herself creates the context for seeing that momentous document in brighter, full light as flawed and exclusive, rather than inclusive. Enter burning, breaking, building, Ashley Howell Bunn’s innovative collection of poems in which the erasure technique is turned not outwards, but inwards. The poet uses her own text to create not only new text out of it.
In her opening poem, Bunn provides a thematic map, as well as a light to navigate the big life truths and rocky re-emergence of a speaker finding her new self among the destruction of her former one. The images illuminating her first stanza arrive like embers in dry tinder:
My sister scrubs the toilet until it full-moon shines
in the dark
holds my mother’s burdens like my father held a
drink.
Her father’s death, her own pregnancy and the birth of her child, and her struggle with and sobriety from alcohol addiction come to us in a collection that is raw, original, and hewn with the attention and care.
Bunn’s practice in these poems to make things new. Her second poem, “90 in 90,” begins as a prose poem in block form, then morphs into a haiku (in its third page) by way of erasure applied to the prose poem mid-step, using the blackout technique as a sort of chrysalis stage. The result of the paring-down of the original text, then further selection from the “mid-poem” into a final haiku, is a deft reimagining of the haibun form first pioneered by the Japanese poet Bashō.
Other themes emerge along the way: womanhood after giving birth, negotiating sexuality and intimacy in a new sober reality, the sense of having avoided—or lived—other lives with much different outcomes. Bunn’s poetry is the only language with which one could possibly convey such behemoth ideas. In “I’m in My Late Thirties, and I hear That,” Bunn writes,
…my breasts swell and
sag like cycles of the moon,
which sounds beautiful but isn’t.
There is nothing romantic, nor do we encounter any assertion of goddess-purity, in her work. Instead, Bunn holds a mirror to the human conditions of perimenopause, postpartum depression, desire—the messiness of living, more as celebration of the real than elevation into the sacred. In “My Sponsor Tells Me to Ho Out,” Bunn dissects such seemingly reckless, but prudently self-reclaiming advice in the voice of her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, asking, What is it that you / want? Her sponsor provides the answers: Let yourself get messy / Let yourself get hurt / by a woman. Let your body / want, and know it is good. / Let that soft animal love. There is no triumphant arrival through a perilous storm at the destination with a smile, a dry back, and epic stories to tell, but poems that describe and embody the survival and rebirth of any person we might pass on the sidewalk on our way to work.
Bunn doesn’t limit herself form-wise to her innovative haibun-erasure technique. She plays with it, mixing the order in which the haiku, the erasure, and the prose poetry piece appear, as in this first section of “Cicada Arcana.”
A haiku appears first, as one might see a cicada emerging from the ground. The haiku is followed by the erasure, then the full prose stanza. Each prose piece in this sequence is an emergence from its last shell before mating, the erasure symbolizing that sloughing-off of what’s expendable to create a whole new text. The resulting haiku, appearing after the complete, unredacted prose piece, is like the eggs laid by the female cicada in her final form, having completed her life cycle, leaving behind a small part of herself to emerge the better part of two decades in the future.
burning, breaking, building contains absolute gems of both experimental and more traditional forms. Bunn allows the form of “Yin Interrupted” to follow the shape and arrangement of herself and her young child on a yoga mat, with the exquisite repetition of the lines our lines perforate together and apart as our air / finds each other. Bunn shows us that sometimes it’s not the form that defines the experiment, but the means in which the poem is composed. Take “I Ask My Six-Year-Old:” in which the poet posts an upper-level philosophy professor’s challenge to her young son: What were you before you were here? As Bunn’s six-year-old asserts, the stars still matter even / if we can’t see them. Sometimes, it’s better to get out of the way of the stars and let them shine as themselves. Bunn does this wisely, and elegantly.
Bunn shows her fearlessness regarding form in how she handles the parts of the page unwritten-on, the white space (an artist would call it the negative space), in “My Star.” Instead of placing the seven-page, spread-out set of seven stanzas at the top of each page, she moves them to the bottom of each page. Whereas in most poems, the space remaining after the poem appears on the page is merely leftover; it’s not considered, and is only the indication that, if the reader hasn’t figured it out already, this poem is over. Turn the page. Bunn puts the white space in play, and it matters. The poem, about her young son, his vulnerability, her motherly instinct to protect and nurture him, weaves imagery of weather and landscape into what feels like a series of landscape features themselves, with the open space above each stanza symbolizing the high skies of her home outside the Colorado Rockies above each stanza, evident in the following stanzas on facing pages:
on the hot concrete I found him and took him back
to the sweetness of the soil in our small garden so
he would have some chance to drink our tears and
leave the salt behind in small crystalline mountains
[…]
crystalline mountains in the distance and the sun
shines through an ember to keep the fire in the
stone alive as the snow falls not like ash
In each stanza, Bunn repeats the last words of the one that precedes it, linking the stanzas across the pages, using the proven poetic technique of repetition in a refreshing way. Touching here as elsewhere in the book on the motifs of burning, of breaking-down and renewal, Bunn once again surprises and delights with the use of form.
Perhaps the most compelling poem in burning, breaking, building is “Something Like Virginia.”
In it, Bunn describes destroying a spider’s web using a match, but later, shifts from being an agent of destruction to an agent of compassion:
I saw her silhouette moving
to rebuild in the middle of the night
[…]
her tenderness
her spiny limbs and
crushable bulb heart
I so admired her strength
[…]
feeling the need to dust
wipe her life into my cloth again
instead,
I welcome her home
let myself rest
As in other poems in this collection, the speaker interrogates her own actions in relation to the world, in her role as host to a small creature also just trying to make a life as best she can, and so the speaker concedes that small piece of real estate in her life to the spider, tired as she is from her own daily chores. As the poems progress from beginning to end in this collection, the reader can see a poet who gradually turns her poetic attention from the self-focus of recovering from addiction, dealing with profound loss, pregnancy and birth, to the world outside herself.
The same compassion for herself takes shape in what might be yet another subtle version of the erasure poem, and the most vividly political erasures in the book’s last pages. Indeed, she quotes Torin A. Greathouse in an afterword gloss: “To erase…any text…is a political act.” Bunn confronts the draconian and dehumanizing I.C.E. raids and complete lack of due process that the Trump immigration enforcement policies have unleashed on the American public in her description of an I.C.E. abduction of a mother and her infant not far from her house in “Melt,” shared below in its entirely for full and proper effect.
In “Melt,” we do not encounter the typical erasure in which Bunn presents a prose poem in its entirely, then blacks out certain passages and words in it, then condenses what remains unredacted further into a haiku, which she calls “burned haibun.” Instead, we see a melted one, in which the original and the erased passages exist in the prose poem, wherein the “erased” passages are grayed-out, readable, but faint, as one might see a patch of snow—or ice—melting in the sun. The haiku ends with the line “woman and infant,” invoking the Madonna and Christ child (nonwhite Hispanics, the main target of the President’s regime, are mostly Catholic and Marian in their religious devotion), the screaming mother holding aloft the lifeless body of her infant child in Picasso’s Guernica, and countless other classic artistic representations of the most precious, most profound loves in the human experience. Throughout burning, breaking, building Bunn has written extensively on her own motherhood, but now we see the focus turned outward, and her righteous anger forming a new way of making erasure poetry into a documentation of legally problematic behavior by federal agents, and the maintaining of the humanity of the people being arrested, rather than the degradation and summary expulsion—the very real erasure, politically, and residentially—of them. Elsewhere, Bunn plays with erasure, as here, but the play, now, is serious, and comes from a personal, maternal footing. This remarkable book belongs read, dog-eared, and re-read on your bookshelf.
Matt Hohner’s publications include Rattle: Poets Respond, Poetry Ireland Review, New Contrast, and Prairie Schooner. Poetry Editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner has published two collections: Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House 2018) and At the Edge of a Thousand Years (out of print), which won the 2023 Jacar Press Award.
Matt’s author photo is by Mel Edden.