I don’t consider myself a particularly good poet, so erasure poetry is not something I ever thought I would be doing. Still, I ended up loving the challenge. The poem is put together from words on page 13 (I didn’t actually think of how fitting this page number is until I sat down to write this passage) of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2006). It’s a novel about Nazi Germany (narrated by Death itself) that perfectly shows the immense terror of that time. Since the novel is quite dark and haunting, that is something I wanted to portray with the poem as well. Although I scanned the page because I couldn’t bear to actually cross out words in a physical book. The horror!
