In Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, a Public Humanities Prison Arts Project, editor Elizabeth Effinger compiles an innovative collaborative project that adapts Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein into a long-form erasure project created by the Erasing Frankenstein Collective. The Collective is comprised of federally incarcerated women, University of New Brunswick students, and members of the Walls to Bridges Collective. Contributors collaborated via snail mail to erase and adorn individual pages of Frankenstein. By the end of the project, the pages were collected and hand- bound into one book that contains the entirety of Frankenstein, with each page transformed into a unique erasure poem.

Erasing Frankenstein contains a full-colour reproduction of the collaborative erasure poem, entitled I or Us (an erasure of Shelley’s full title Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus), and four chapters that explore the project’s complexity, from the ethics of erasure as a poetic form, to carceral aesthetics, to the successes and failures of the project. These chapters help situate I or Us in context, giving the reader more to consider as they interpret erasure, but as I read Erasing Frankenstein, I found a particular joy in reading the section that contains I or Us.

When I first flipped through this section, I immediately felt a surge of excitement pulse through my body and a grin spread across my face. The collection is illuminated with lush illustrations, vivid colours, bold permanent marker lines blacking out text, and exuberant designs scrawled across pages. Once I sat down to read in earnest, the pages proved to be as diverse textually as they are visually. Contributors’ individuality comes through clearly, with some focusing almost only on text, creating long complex poetry with no visual accompaniment, while others use illustration as the focal point with only a scant number of words left visible.

While I or Us is a collection of disparate art fragments from different people, together they create a cohesive whole, reminiscent of Frankenstein’s creature, whose body is made up of parts from varied sources and stitched together. It also highlights many gothic themes, likely inspired by the source text, with illustrations of storms, ravens, dark abysses, fire, monstrosity, and despair alongside poems with equally bleak textual content. However, about half of the fragments present a contradicting lightness with recurring textual themes of “hope, love, and friendship” and imagery of sun, rainbows, and flowers. Some pages combine contrasting illustration and text to create a sense of playfulness and dark humour, such as one piece that features a vibrant Earth in cheery blue and green marker, with the simple words “humanity / its / hopeless.” It is typical to turn from one page that feels heavy with despair to another that is brimming with joy, creating a textual conversation between light and dark throughout the piece.

The project is a stunning example of long-form collaborative erasure poetry. It demonstrates a powerful interplay between text and visual art, prose and poetry, and canon literature and amateur writing to create a delightful art piece. Erasing Frankenstein achieves this by drawing from classic source material and breathing new life into it by artistically reimagining and reworking parts of the novel that may otherwise be forgotten or deemed inconsequential. It is difficult to read this book without immediately wanting to start ripping the pages from your old books and taking an arsenal of markers to them.