VOS

Poems by Erik Fuhrer
Digital Collages by Erik Fuhrer Yavanika Press, 2019

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

​

—Daniel Y. Harris

Editor-in Cheif of X-Peri

BUY NOW

Sample Art from the Book

A black and white collage including a large human eye, a partial image of a stoplight, and an arm.
Black and white collage including redacted images of insects and a human heart.
A black and white collage with lips and smoke.

Words, Virginia Woolf suggested in her essay-talk ‘Craftsmanship’, ‘hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change’. 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, where ‘a cow’s knees are tall grass’ and ‘Rats put down roots/ with human beings who knew better than to stay’. In such images we are invited to revel in the nature of erasure.

 

--Derek Ryan

Author of Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life.

Cover image for Fuhrer's not human enough for the census, including black lettering and an image with red and yellow wedges on a blue background.

Book Trailer