Hope Tree is a book of poetic erasure. It was created by erasing words from a manual titled How to Prune Fruit Trees (How To Prune Fruit Trees). By pruning back the language of the original source, Hope Tree creates lyric poems of loss and longing."
Praise
Training, cutting, removing: the language of Hope Tree in Frank Montesonti’s erasure moves through the seasons: “very little can / be done / cutting / spring from the inside,” he writes. From a book on the pruning of fruit trees, in which a certain amount of killing is inevitable, Montesonti crafts a book about mortal lives, in which “an imaginary circle / drawn around / the future” may take us only “halfway between the end / without further / pruning.” In this book of instruction and wry observation, carefully gleaned from the vocabulary and metaphor of the orchard, Montesonti has found a way to tell grave truths.
—Janet Holmes
Every erasure uncovers, we all know this—and we know that properly pruned trees bear more fruit. The pared-down language in Frank Montesonti’s Hope Tree reveals and multiplies meaning. What begins as a meditation on seasons and orchards becomes a poetic treatise on the cultural frameworks we construct and inhabit daily, the frameworks we use to discipline ourselves and others. bearing fruit requires cutting and burning, and Hope Tree questions the cost of both act and metaphor: “the bush method, / this system is extremely simple / the main thing to remember // take advantage.”
—K. Lorraine Graham
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