The Art of the Death is a book-length erasure poem that emerged from a desire to materially confront grief, loss, and anger during the coronavirus pandemic. Using Donald Trump’s 1987 bestselling book The Art of the Deal as a base text, The Art of the Death records the date and cumulative coronavirus death toll on each page beginning January 20th, 2020, and ending January 20th, 2021, while erasing the text to create an extended soliloquy in the former president’s voice. Taking up Solmaz Sharif’s statement that “the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic….is happening alongside a proliferation…of it as a state tactic”, the book speaks in conversation with the many state erasures the pandemic witnessed: from the removal of coronavirus tracking data in government dashboards to the extensive loss of life and livelihood. The Art of the Death, whose first and last pages are sealed with the author’s own blood, attempts to construct a new narrative of the year’s events by creating lyric fragments, confessions, questions, and silences that resonate with meaning. Influenced by works of erasure from poets like M. NourbeSe Philip, Srikanth Reddy, Solmaz Sharif, and Jordan Abel, as well as the text art of Jenny Holzer and Dongwan Hong, the book’s project is to reclaim, subvert, and recontextualize language in order to discover its hidden edges and omissions. Creating The Art of the Death took place over 11 months and used a total of 74 black markers. You can read a preview of the full document below.