Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson. Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, 2012. 64 pages. $14.95.
I Take Back the Sponge Cake is a playful choose-your-own adventure book that combines poetry and mixed-media drawings. Loren Erdrich’s images came first and, for the most part, Sierra Nelson’s poems grew up around them. We created this review in the same order: drawings, then text. Like the artist-poet collaborations between Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara, and between Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, this book reminds readers of the importance of play and chance in art. Taken individually, the poems and images are light and amusing, nearly to the point of being inconsequential. But together, there’s an exciting tinder and spark relationship between Erdrich’s images and Nelson’s text; they create a fire that, while perhaps not hot enough to burn, creates a lovely light.
— Darcie Dennigan and Carl Dimitri
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Click here to view pages from I Take Back the Sponge Cake, originally published on KROnline.
