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A review by davidjme
A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Phillips

3.0

Generally, I find blackout poetry a bit gimmicky - just sort of cut and paste shenanigans, really. This one was saved by the sheer scope of its project: take an entire Victorian novel, spend decades finding little nuggets of poetry in each page, painting over everything else, then rearranging the pages into some sort of thematic order.

For example:
http://www.chrismclaren.com/blog/wp-content/images/2008/04/142.jpg

A few dozen of the poem-pages struck me as pretty bland and uninspired, and were a bit of a drudge to get through. When the individual lines/poem-pages were good, though, they absolutely soared.

All in all, the book didn't win me over to the blackout style, but it definitely caught my eye and juggled with it for a few hours