Hotel Almighty has been out for six months today. It’s been wonderful having a book out and the best thing about it is—surprise!—readers. I’ve had teachers tell me how the book excited their students; I heard from a reader who credited it with rekindling her interest in and openness to poetry; I’ve seen bloggers talk about being inspired by it; and a fellow poet told me that her six-year old sat down to read it with her because of the collages.

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s published a book but one of the best (& worst) experiences is reading reviews on GoodReads and the like by complete strangers.  One reviewer on GoodReads wrote “This book changed my life.” I mean, that’s a moment for a poet to gulp and make sure you’re on the right page. I guess getting feedback shouldn’t have surprised me. Of course people were going to read the book when it was published. That was the point.

I’m grateful to those who’ve done longer reviews. This month, Amanda Moore focused on three erasures from the book at Women’s Voices for Change, which was a good way in. She called the book “an innovative, compelling work of visual lyric.”

Aarik Danielsen, who also reviewed the book recently for The Curator, said this:

Sarah Sloat’s Hotel Almighty urges us to participate in our own re-creation, starting with how we see. Retraining our eyes not only to read between the lines, but to do away with directions like “between” altogether, and to blur the categories of text and subtext. 

Sloat’s work here belongs within the offbeat orthodoxy of found poetry; the popular label “blackout poetry” certainly applies to her method of scratching out, painting over or otherwise obscuring printed text, thereby bringing novel messages to the surface. And yet these terms, which live in negative language, don’t fully capture Sloat’s sublime, unsettling outcomes. 

She coaxes Technicolor poetry from preexisting pages; new verse isn’t merely found—as in stumbled upon—but unearthed. Erasing, editing and etching, Sloat alters an earlier transmission, reshaping the ultimate message received.