I Take Back the Sponge Cake

Poetry. Art. I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is a pick-your-path collaboration between poet Sierra Nelson and visual artist Loren Erdrich. Each turn of the page features an ink and watercolor drawing, a poem, and a choice between two sound-alike words that create a variety of paths through the book. The adventure always begins in the same place, but depending on your choices your reading experience moves by emotional meander--leaping, looping, and surprising until it finally reaches one of the possible endings. With its blend of words, artwork, and audience participation, I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is a triple threat.

Erdrich and Nelson's collaboration is a delight. There's a perfect amount of distance between the poems and the images in this book--enough to allow for the snap of connection and the fizz of dissonance. Their lyrical invention asks you to choose between homophones to complete a given sentence, creating a surprising portrait of your own disposition at the same time that it produces multiple pathways to the book's splendid endings.--Matthea Harvey

Antic, frantic, didactic, and seriously at play in a word territory Erdrich and Nelson make up, find, map, and inhabit. I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE invites anyone who wants to explore it with them to come along, providing handy instructions, guides, surprises, and illustrations, saying to anyone who's inclined to join in, there's plenty of room, you're welcome.--Dara Wier

I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is an invitation to adventure in Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson's dream mystery. Allured and implicated by the sweet perversity of the mutable body, we're asked to hold rib cages, feel for faces in the mirror, take bunnies by the ears. Each page reverses the work of the image; here, lyric illuminates illustration. I found myself asking, how do you recognize a text without words? How do you recognize a ghost without her sheet and chains?--Sommer Browning

At the core of the mobius world of I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is joy, a child-like joy of returning to the rhetoric of pick-your-own-path-adventures, a joy of associative play between image and verse, a joy in the terror of homophones and tongue-stuck lovers, and the culminating joy of the text making and remaking itself. This morphing book continually satisfies my urge for more: more absurdity, more darkness, more fun, more fish-man monsters with the orangey teeth.--Mathias Svalina