A Little White Shadow

 A Little White Shadow by Mary Ruefle, 42 pages

For her book A Little White Shadow, Mary Ruefle took a nineteenth century book, A Little White Shadow by one "E.M.M.", and whited out much of the text, leaving snippets that interact with each other in new ways but remain surrounded by the obfuscated passages from which they were cut, grounding them in their now irrecoverable original context.  It is easy to dismiss the concept as a gimmick, but it is just as easy to imagine it as a commentary on creativity, originality, and influence, the text as palimpsest and so on and on.  At times the poetry descends to the former, indulging in the barbaric babbling so beloved of modern poets, challenging the reader to find profundity in nonsense.  At other times (and more and more often as the poem progresses) it transcends the latter, crafting passages of genuine beauty.