Punc

A lot of what steers you through a book isn't the words. A comma tells you to take a breath, a period tells you to stop, and an exclamation point tells you someone is yelling. You follow every one of those instructions while you read, and you almost never notice them.

Punc takes the words away and leaves the instructions. Without the words, punctuation stops being invisible, and you can see a book's rhythm on its own: where a writer keeps you going without a breath, where the dialogue gets crowded and everyone talks over each other, and where it goes quiet for a while. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland comes out loud and nervous, full of exclamation points and questions, which is how the book feels to read.

I think a lot of what we call a writer's voice lives in those marks. Two writers can use the same words and sound nothing alike, because one of them never lets a sentence end and the other stops every few words. Punc takes the meaning out of a book, and a lot of the voice is still there.

It's an erasure, like the blackout poems I make on paper, except a blackout poem keeps a few words and Punc keeps none.