VOS

Description

VOS (Yavanika Press, 12/24/19) is a poetic erasure of Virginia Woolf's first novel, A Voyage Out, with accompanying collages by Erik Fuhrer. Cover image by Kimberly Androlowicz. Forward by Laci Mattison.

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"An erasure can be censorship but it can also be tribute. I lovingly picked through Woolf’s words to scratch the trace of the impression her language has had in me. In many ways, I would not be a poet without her words. This book is a concrete impression of the relationship my words have had with hers. It is a memoir of sorts of my encounter with Woolf’s work. And what better text to explore this in than a novel that is itself about encounters."

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-From the Introduction

Art from the Book

Praise for VOS

"Erasurist, Erik Fuhrer, in his Voyage Out Sonnets, is part vivisectionist, part misprisionist. In surgically erasing Virginia Woolf’s A Voyage Out, Fuhrer augments the canon of great erasurists dating back to the Dadaists. A palimpsest of memento mori collages in noir serve as VOS’ metadata for this book. Fuhrer’s VOS is erasure’s crescendo."

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—Daniel Y. Harris

"Fuhrer has a distinctive ability to cull wonder, humor, ache, in a single line. Each sonnet takes us on a journey not only through the imagery and action, but through the texture and rhythm that mirror the motion of the water, connecting the original text and Fuhrer’s alchemical parallel world. Reality becomes fragmentary, bodies function only in parts. Surprising, searing, playful, heartbreaking - this is a realm you’ll want to continue to discover forever, 'drawing love from hollows of days.'”

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—Susanna Velarde Covarrubias

"Inspired by Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, precisely to cut her words loose from any settled meanings, Erik Fuhrer’s VOS shimmers with the multiplicity and plasticity of language. The result is a remarkable series of poems that assemble human and nonhuman (as well as what Fuhrer calls ‘Honestly inhuman’) life in playful, strange, intimate and often surreal arrangements."

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—Derek Ryan