It was about a year ago, almost to this very day that I stumbled upon this book. Battered and shoved between the crevices of a decaying wall, this book, along with two others, sat pinned between the cracks in the wall where no book belongs. So naturally, even though I was walking somewhere with friends, I stopped everything I was doing to rescue these lonesome orphaned books. It isn’t everyday you find books left for trash to bring home.

But once I had the book, I was not sure what to do with it. It sat on my shelf for months and every once and a while I would look at it from across the room; it always felt like it was calling me.

One day it hit me and I knew exactly why I had rescued these abandoned books; the answer was to give them new life. So I decided to repurpose the whole book by turning every single page into its own poem. I had heard in the past about blackout poetry, specifically the newspaper blackouts of Austin Kleon. Many years in the past I had admired his work and his motto that “creativity is subtraction” but never thought it was a poetry technique I could attempt myself. This book, Bandit Love, was my perfect chance to try.

So I began a journey, that in no way is finished yet, but it is well underway. I decided to turn this entire book into pages and pages of blackout poetry; each page is a new and separate story that I created by taking the words that the original author put on the page and then re-purposing the meaning by picking and choosing the specific words I desired to give each page an entirely new meaning beyond that the original author intended.

I will be trying to post a new page of the book every day when I can. So here is my blackout poetry project.