“All erasure is by nature a transgression. . . . The voice of Her Read knows that by creating art at all, a female artist transgresses cultural norms, and much of history. To ‘deface,’ to erase the very book that codifies that culture and history, is a transgression indeed. Steinorth, consciously representing a class of people excluded from the history and the meaning of Western art, breaks, enters, and transforms. And she undertakes that transgression as an act of civil disobedience.”
—The Georgia Review
"Over the 240 pages in which Steinorth tropes the very idea of 'erasure' in reclaiming womxn’s representation and participation in art, she clears spaces for hope, joy, and the real work of living in and with pain, this latter most insistently: 'I would like to free / colour / and so emancipate / my / shadow / from this / connoisseur’s enthusiasm for pain.' Hers is no scholar’s pain, no writing on the anguish of another subject, but a gloriously full-throated song of direct experience."
—Rain Taxi
"Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s Her Read: a graphic poem is a stunning and ambitious book that pushes the boundaries of poetry, art, and the page. Her Read sings the effaced history of female authorship and artistic life, more generally."
—The Los Angeles Review
"Steinorth’s Her Read is a beautifully executed new breed of erasure poetry."
—RHINO Poetry
"The poem is a kind of reclamation of the history of art, by and for women: writers and painters and art enthusiasts. This is, after all, Her Read."
—Michael Jarmer on The Book I Read
"Her Read is as much about process and liberation of expression as the content which guides the reader/viewer by the same principals. Surprise and extol arise at the turn of each page. Written during the global pandemic, Steinorth flags the prescient conflicts and tensions of the era including the actions toward “imp”-peachment for the powers in charge. Gaining momentum to embrace pain and to rise forth with justice to end oppression..."
—Poemelon: A Journal of Poetry
"In Her Read, Steinorth works on multiple levels. Her Read is a feminist, visceral, humorous, visual, considered, and nuanced revisioning of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, “found at a library discard sale.” As she dives into her source text, Steinorth doesn’t hide herself—author of this re-envisioned text, poet, bodily inhabitant of the contemporary world—but instead foregrounds the self as she modifies, operates upon, uncovers, removes, defaces, and supplements both language and image. Literary erasure projects sometimes feel like they focus on the surface of the page, but Steinorth’s volume excavates depth: the more pages we read, the deeper we are allowed go."
—Colorado Review
“Her Read is a book of wicked elation. Enacting revelation through effacement, divination through artistry, and lyric out of transgression, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth has produced a poem that is ‘love suffused with iron.’ Dismantling and refashioning the patriarchal story of art, of women in art, of women making art, Her Read necessarily begins in pain, but it transmutes that pain into the energy of recovery, inscribing into art the utterances that were not found or welcomed there. Her Read is singular, a book that none of its readers will ever forget.”
—Rick Barot, author of The Galleon
“The profound achievement of Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s collage poem is in its scope as well as its internal beauty. ‘Why do we art?’ it asks, and the answer leads us through history, raising what has been quietly, often painfully, subsumed under the traditional story, represented by a particular book, The Meaning of Art, by Herbert Read. Here comes the feminine, the imp, breaking through, or squeezing around, the old story, word by word! The result is less an erasure than a separate art, stitched upon, painted upon, cut into. It is a study in desire and erotic play—amusing, troubling, beautiful, and broken. It sings the pain of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers and celebrates the beauty of mutual love, male and female. Its originality and heart leave me breathless.”
—Fleda Brown, author of Flying Through a Hole in the Storm
“The marvelous erasure poems in Her Read levitate then dart their needle back into history, in a holy unholiness. Against the masters and doctors and conquistadors and the ‘I exhibition’ of men, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth seeks ‘a passage from what is’ into ‘the lake we make of she.’ Along the way, ‘paint’ casts off part of its body, admitting ‘pain’ and pain becomes art. The resulting artifact is indeed an ‘embroidered wound’: a weave of arrows and mazes, gashes of thread, portals, and the collaged image of a severed oracle, where alternative worlds spring from each of her wounds: or, or, or. Radiating both harm and cure, there is nothing like this book: it is sublime, a masterpiece.”
—Nomi Stone, author of Kill Class
“Impish and beautiful, and dazzlingly subversive, Her Read expresses the ‘sacred rage’ to be seen, to be beheld. The question Jennifer Sperry Steinorth eloquently poses, through writing over Herbert Read's misogynistic text on art, is: ‘How / can / we who imagine ourselves dancing ... / re-enter the / body’? This is not a book of poems, it's an archeology of palimpsests, a recovery by covering, a visionary art made out of the cadaver of art criticism.”
—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Map
“For, by erasure, Steinorth reveals a hidden presence in those buried centuries of female artistry, an erasure of an erasure. Her trickster liberates not just new text, but creates, through additives, a brilliant hyper-inventive visual artistry. So that what begins in erasure transforms, as the book goes on, into a rich, layered graphic poem whose meanings emerge through skill in design and delight in pattern and texture—an artist’s and a builder’s and designer’s eye collaborating with a poet’s tongue, and a dancer’s knowledge of how expression begins in the body.
—from an introduction by Eleanor Wilner, Recipient of Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Poetry
“Each page of Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s erasure project, Her Read, is so bursting with original artwork that the source text is not only transformed but transfigured. What’s left of the original looms behind her paintings and drawings like a draft from the next room—not extinguished but banished, with little chance of parole. Steinorth’s visual art is deeply embodied and unashamed—rendered in reds, creams, yellows, browns and organic, anatomical shapes that evoke womxn’s real bodies, labors, triumphs, horrors. Think Louise Bourgeois. Her Read, too, is a kind of ‘articulated lair’ in which womxn’s stories—the unbeautiful and impure—are un-erased, kept safe. Steinorth writes, ‘It requires an exorcism not to define ourselves—regardless of gender—relative to these objects: womxn as told through the stories and paintings of men.’ We’re in luck, then, because Steinorth is an exorcist of the highest capability.”
—Jane Huffman, founder of Guesthouse
"An artist’s book? A poem? A graphic journey? All three and more, this curious, and curiously beautiful book, Her Read, by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, published by Texas Review Press. The book follows a certain genre of artist’s book, as an altered book, i.e. an existing book whose pages have been painted over, with certain words left visible, certain patterns in the painting leading through the text the poet/artist wants the reader to know. In this case, the original source (i.e. the book painted over) isThe Meaning of Art, a rather misogynist (at least by contemporary eyes) work of art history that almost entirely ignores women. Steinorth’s work, on the other hand, is a triumph for women, and for all of us. The genre of the painted book, most famously represented by the British artist Tom Phillips’s A Humument, is here distinguished by not only its beautiful varying surprises on each page, but by its readability, which is no small accomplishment when each page is thoroughly painted. What remains in Her Read is an ongoing story of finding oneself, showing oneself, posing an identity that is constantly in flux, expressed visually and textually. I thought to quote from it, but found that an impossible task, to separate text from visual art, which is as it should be in this perfectly realized graphic adventure."
—Texas Institute of Letters Contest Judges: Edward Vidaurre, Charles Alexander, & Dr. Saba Razvi
