Any work of erasure constitutes, by definition, certain frictions: a negotiation of authority; a wrestling with the vicissitudes of technique; and an unavoidable contretemps with the overtly political. Regardless of whether or not such grapplings are within the poet’s intended scope, the form itself establishes a textual landscape for their provenance. As the poet Solmaz Sharif, in her brilliant 2013 essay on erasure, points out: “[t]he political is…enacted wherever power is at hand, power being at hand wherever there is a relation, including the relation between text and reader.”[1] And, in the case of erasure, between text and poet; between text and text; between text and image; between materials, effacement, intended meaning, and serendipitous resonance.
Lisa Olstein’s Distinguished Office of Echoes arrives into an emerging tradition of erasure in which these negotiations of power operate on a subtler register. Numbering among its companions might be Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow or Matthea Harvey’s playful Of Lamb, but also the ebullient collage work of Sarah J. Sloat in Hotel Almighty and, more recently, Classic Crimes. Yet Ruefle and Harvey lean into an arch cleverness, while Sloat’s work, by virtue mainly of her distinctive image-systems and aphoristic pithiness, revels in a vibrant quirkiness that translates to a louder presence on the page. Olstein, by contrast, enters erasure at a deceptively understated aesthetic wavelength. No less powerful than its contemporaries, Distinguished Office nonetheless performs within a more nuanced, polyvocal interstice that is neither coy, nor eccentric, nor elemental, nor pointedly politicized, but which wriggles between those modes with adept precision and fresh sensibilities. For Olstein, erasure isn’t so much a tool for showing the world new meaning as it is a way to go looking for it.
In her effacement technique, Olstein uses neatly-applied, mostly-opaque white watercolor, but also peek-through collage, cutouts, and artful overlay. For materials, she limits herself exclusively to images culled from her source texts, employing a palimpsestic layering that is varied in image and pattern yet visually cohesive throughout. Each of Distinguished Office’s three sections derives from a different text, all of which were published within a forty-year period spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This temporal proximity allows for a certain stylistic continuity when it comes to visual elements—age tanning, for instance, is relatively uniform throughout, and fonts and typesets are similar. However, illustrations from each text vary sufficiently from one another to give each movement a unique visual lexicon.
In the first section, “Inner Coast,” Olstein plumbs an 1865 reference book on marine wildlife for dark, high-contrast images—chalk lithographs, or perhaps reverse woodcuts—and for language that contends with death and loss. For the middle section, “War With,” we leap forward through time to a 1903 text on Greek history—and to color illustrations, whose blues, yellows and pinks feel wondrous after the stark visuals of “Inner Coast.” Perhaps the most legible section in terms of its politic, the first page begins, “in / this little book / the heroes are not / some / girls who love / the past,” and as we continue to read, we sense both the ironic humor in this salvo and a genuine concern regarding modernity’s impulsive desire to look to antiquity—idealized at its most bellicose and hyper-masculinized—for models of futurity.
In the book’s final section, “Near and Distant Regions,” we jump back again in time to arrive at what is perhaps the most interiorized portion of Distinguished Office—appropriate, given that its source text is an 1876 handbook on human physiology and hygiene featuring detailed black-and-white renderings of the human body and organs. In this final section, Olstein undertakes what she describes in her afterword as “reclaiming the voice of the examined,”[2] in a sleight of hand reminiscent of Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's Her Read: an inversion of gaze which subtly shifts the axis of power attendant in the metatextual dynamic of erasure’s particular mechanics.
Each section orbits distinct concerns, but as whole, the book gravitates toward certain throughlines in a way that mirrors the book’s visual cohesion. Consider, for instance, the way page 12 from “Inner Coast”:
We would say for the benefit of / the curious / one is / obliged to creep on hands and knees / through / that / roof / which is / completely hidden
is in conversation with page 53, from “War With”:
lovingly / the river / pours its waters into / the sea / of which we know very little / no one / passing through / to tell us anything
and with this page 85 passage from “Near and Distant Regions”:
like reason / when it pours through a broken / window / tends to / demand a consequence / a / hearing / into / the design of / being so held
We sense a distinct speaker behind the tone and syntax of each section, yet a cluster of themes becomes evident: a preoccupation with what is hidden, and how it might be revealed; a curiosity about ideas of nature and edifice; and a reflection on intimacy and alienation, and how we contend with excesses or deficits of either. And, undergirding these concerns, a meditation on the poet’s responsibility to attend not only to where we are now, but to what has come before—on scales that range in magnitude from the minute, to the personal, to the generational and historical. Adding to this sense of continuity is a recurring pattern of punctuation-only pages, which emerge in “Inner Coast” with a series of semicoloned pages, and are called back to in “Near and Distant Regions” through several variations including parentheses, em-dashes, and a page of whimsically multi-sized curly brackets, a visual motif which is also borrowed as embellishment for the section breaks, and which feels emblematic of the text’s unfurling of scope and scale.
Of her experience composing Distinguished Office of Echoes, Olstein writes, “[c]omposition became a devotional practice, intensive study a kind of divination.”[3] We apprehend this most clearly in moments of fruitful tension that arise where syntax deviates from an expected path, or where repetition holds us in momentary stasis, or, at times, in moments of suspended vocality—as suggested by the pages of punctuation—where the questing mind behind the project seems to pause, observe, consider. As a practitioner of erasure myself, these apertures of tentative insight feel both familiar and deeply gratifying. Olstein speaks of the “embodied experience”[4] of working with “no spare copies or backups…just the fragile, friable pages”[5] of her source texts, which allow her to “draw nearer to the material body of language itself.”[6] And in doing so, she draws nearer as well to the material underneath language, the material of meaning itself.
Olstein’s is a delicate poetics, a subtle politic—one that abandons absolutes and seeks instead to speak from a subdued yet persistent middle place; one for which tenderness and intimacy are foregrounded, in which curiosity and discernment become the AC/DC current propelling us forward. This is the sort of poetics, and politic, I long for; one that feels increasingly essential as a means of bearing witness to how we live, how we once lived, and what we can imagine when we ask ourselves: where do we go from here?
[1] Solmaz Sharif, “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure,” Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, Issue 28 (April 2013), accessed October 29, 2025, https://www.thevolta-org.zulaufdesign.com/ewc28-ssharif-p1.html
[2] p. 109
[3] p. 106
[4] p. 106
[5] p. 106-107
[6] p. 107
