I reviewed Jen Sperry Steinorth’s Her Read, a graphic poem over at the Colorado Review. There’s so much to enjoy about this lush volume, and I found myself charmed not only by the language of these poems, but also by Steinorth’s process, her tactile and visual project, and the heft of the final product.

Our expectations about what a book is and might contain are constantly evolving. In our current century, readers encounter traditional volumes, tactile texts bound with front and back covers, as well as more ephemeral e-books, texts we read on screens, whose words disappear and are replaced when we “turn” a page. A book of poetry may certainly take either of these forms, but Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s newly released Her Read: A Graphic Poem demands a specific attention from readers: it requires readers to consider the book not merely as a container for text, but also to think of the book as a meaningful object in and of itself. Sperry’s volume clearly belongs in the emerging canon of literary erasure; Her Read also impressively interrogates and complicates our understanding of the possibilities of this form.

-Genevieve Kaplan, Colorado Review

You can read the whole review online here.