Dan Brady’s Subtexts is a collection that uncovers the language within language and examines how layers of meaning add and subtract from each other. In an innovative form, Brady uses erasure poetry to create something new entirely. The poems here concern themselves with history, politics, the environment, our ability and failure to communicate, and more. Experimental while still accessible, Brady’s erasure poetry finds the freedom to say all that there is to say—and reveals even that which is left unsaid.

“Brady’s poems contract and unfurl as you read them. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but imagine what mysteries would be revealed if you took a cell sample from the paper this book is printed on and looked at it under a microscope. What if you dissected the book’s spine or were handed an MRI of the writer’s brain? These excavations reveal beautifully layered and nuanced truths.”

— Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?

“The poems in Dan Brady’s Subtexts build a world for us on their own terms as each page dives deeper into the personal and the communal through expansion and contraction. Brady’s play with form teaches us how to be better readers, to listen closely to what is being said and perhaps more importantly to the unspoken. Between the lines are moments of joy and pain, of confusion and surrender. ‘I want you to know that I am here. We are here together,’ Brady writes. Together we grow into, through, and towards language.”

—Eloisa Amezcua, author of Fighting Is Like a Wife

Available from Publishing Genius.