We Drank Tea & Stars
by Judah Crow & Nadine Oubi

This is a fascinating little independent publication that I can’t find listed anywhere online, but ran across on my uncle’s bookcase, after he had apparently found it in a little free library. Poems by Crow and illustrations by Oubi, the really fascinating part is that they’re all collages, both the visual and the text.

I’m familiar with collage art and immediately recognized it when I saw it, and these were fascinating and fun examples of that. But I hadn’t even heard of collage poetry before, the closest I’ve come is erasure poetry: using found text and erasing everything except the words the new artist wants to highlight for their poem. Instead of that, this collage poetry samples lines from other written works and combines them in new ways. Crow also points out that there’s an extra level of collaboration that came from the way most of the samples were from translated works: so there’s the original author, the translator, and then Crow, each providing a different context.

Poetry isn’t really my reading genre of choice, but I do love seeing people do new and interesting things with text. And while I could admire the poetry without any particular understanding or critical thinking, I really enjoyed the afterward talking about the process, and also the Sources list, which ranged between works I’ve never read to works I’ve never even heard of.