BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This is my first exposure to erasure poetry, which I had never even heard of until now.  Chunks of an existing text—in this case, a real study of homosexuals from the 1930s called Sex Variants—are blacked out, so that the visible text forms something new.  Photos abound in this book, including those of the erasure poetry, which were definitely above my pay grade.  Suffice it to say that the non-traditional format of this book rendered it too cerebral for me.  Basically, an unnamed gay narrator is trading stories with an elderly gay man named Juan, who is dying.  These two men met in a mental institution, and now they are swapping stories, sometimes describing events as if describing a movie—a clever way to set the scene more vividly.  The book is a mixture of fact and fiction and may be semi-autobiographical, but one of my chief beefs is that I found it difficult to decipher who was talking—Juan or the narrator, whom Juan calls “nene.”  There are pages and pages of dialog with no identification as to who is saying what, except that occasionally the speaker addresses Juan or nene, so that we know that the other character is speaking.  There is some fascinating history here, particularly with regard to homosexuality as a mental health condition, but if this book was a test, I failed.