MERMAID

A classic, blacked-out and illustrated.

In perhaps—if possible—a greater disservice to this classic fairy tale than the 1989 Disney film, poet and self-described erasurist Farkas “rescues” “The Little Mermaid,” turning what she describes as a tale of a “prince-obsessed fish [who] was willing to give away her…most precious gift, just to land a boy” into a “better, stronger (and yes, feminist) story.” She accomplishes this by blacking out all the nuance along the way. Make no mistake, blackout is a subversive and powerful use of destruction as creation. As an introduction to the concept of blackout poetry, the book serves its purpose—offering up the original text reprinted in full and bound back to back with the poem not as a point of comparison, but as sacrifice for budding young blackout poets. Yet the lack of appreciation for the depth of the original text, of which the tragedy and beauty of destruction is such a core theme, is what makes this unbearably ironic. With her marker liberally applied to Andersen’s prose, Farkas produces gems like “she didn’t want her fins and tail,” and “the sweet witch… / ...beckoned her to see where she belongs. / princess of fishes, of course a boy could never change her.” The project is buoyed only by Triplett’s whimsical illustrations of marine life, a pink-haired White mermaid, and emotive, abstract currents of color rendered in what looks like paint pen.

Not as liberating as it wants to be.