Everything we learn about reading guides our eye and orders our understanding: left to right, one sentence to the next. Everything we learn about living does the same—here is the map for an ordered life. Now follow it.
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.
“Erasure, like all found poetry, is a process of discovery and reinvention,” Sloat writes in the book’s introduction. “Above all it’s about possibility, and trusting in possibility. That, and ruining your eyesight.”
Hotel Almighty recognizes that the world is made of symbols and markers, of language both voiced and unspoken. Sloat creates poetry from the modern mystery canon. Partaking in a found poetry exercise grounded in the books of Stephen King, she initially regarded her straw as too short. She hoped to use The Shining as her source text, but instead drew “wintry, imprisoning Misery.” Accepting her lot and plunging into the puzzle, Sloat acknowledged “there is no right answer,” no holy code within the text, “but there might be a good answer.” We face the same dilemma dozens of times a day: Accept and absorb the messages laid out before us—or save ourselves through rebellious syntax.
Sloat’s stanzas hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest; but, contra Paul Simon’s boxer, this is a means of giving mercy to oneself, not merely carrying on in oblivion. The poet embraces the late English preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ admonition to direct our sermons inward, to stop passively listening to our inner monologues and start talking to ourselves.
Sloat never dodges or disavows her source material—and neither can we. The title Misery precedes nearly every poem, and Sloat preserves the original page numbers. Existing sentences bleed through blocks of color and stormy scrawl; the resourceful reader might still decipher the script. Misery never completely evaporates from the record, and neither do our experiences. With intention, they recede into the background to inform—not define—who we are and what we make.
To read Hotel Almighty like a book of proverbs would be fruitful enough. Not-so-accidental phrases angle toward the reader, flirting with our desire to be found and fleshed out in the space of a few sentences. Popping off different pages, new idioms practically beg to be canonized:
“guilt was a Rat-catching job”
“What was champagne but a change of Angels.”
“like the damp the mistress had the run of the house”
“O lovely dear little blisters of the moon”
“… there are lions behind and by-God lions ahead”
Still greater themes emerge. Sloat’s work testifies to the strangeness of existence, how we are caught between stations of repose and upheaval. An anxious energy presses into these pages, the buzz of becoming intruding upon our desire for calm in both dynamic and understated ways. One page reads: “the sound of the wind / filled / the phone / squeezing into the / line / like / a / nerve awake / at night.” Sloat calls our attention to the thresholds we cross—and the ones we lie down across: “darkness prologued / darkness / the sleeper wakes / only / to / lapse into / flowers.”
Form and meaning woo each other, as many of Sloat’s recreations meditate on the work of revising our lives. The book’s reason for existence, its own curious revelations, become manifest and self-evident on an early page: “all the world might, / at any time, / like a / stage / savagely illuminated / burst / into / place.”
Satisfy the craving to be remodeled, Sloat exhorts, whether it costs a little or a lot. Whether your final form appears “new and improved,” as the mad men say, or simply settles into its skin. A pair of facing pages wrestle with two sides of the same idea. “joy / would / crawl over / broken glass, if that was / the / way,” the first reads. Let your eyes cross a minor chasm and the narrator makes a quiet peace offering to themselves: “If I / could be / a dim shape / slumped over / and round / Would that be so bad?”
But Sloat suggests that re-creating—and returning to—ourselves happens in a series of small, simple acts, not gambles and go-for-brokes. “once he forced / a small miracle / in to / The hole in the / morning,” one minute poem reads. Another renders this personal phenomenon in natural, atmospheric terms:
the haze. / was making progress of the hazy variety), / somewhere below / the sun and south of / the storm / the / haze / became / quality. / haze,
Sloat discovers, and recasts, this crucial work with alternating images. Like her, in summoning the will and words to define ourselves, we act as mechanics straining to identify “whatever it is that’s making that / wonk-wonk inside,” as lumberjacks taking an axe to memory, and pilgrims making “a home of goddamn.” Each metaphor opens the book’s thesis to a distinct audience, and grants access to another aspect of Sloat’s photo-realistic word picture.
As we grasp and gather words to describe ourselves, we inevitably smack our heads against a great silence. Moments within Hotel Almighty pause to commiserate, then return to the slow and steady push. If anything—any life at all—flickers inside us, we will press ahead toward reinvention. Amid a field of colored bars and cut lines, Sloat captures this spiritual discipline:
the / night / can turn / as bright as / icebergs), green and white; / I heard this from a / man who. / had / to begin.’
The miracle of existence arrives with conditions; our end of the covenant demands we remain in motion, gripping our God-given pencil to erase, strikethrough and underline the holy and profane scriptures life hands us.
New partners or parents sift the family attic, making ‘keep’ and ‘discard’ piles from the histories they inherit. Disciples build their personal theologies, saving themselves through the best advice from a bevy of available counselors. We sing along to some commercials and mute others, molding the messages we receive until we become the media. The only other option: wither.
Lord.’ / you, / kept right on going downhill / badly slurred — / The road you were on
Sloat’s less-than-linear approach leads us back to our best hope, over and again: “to write / a silver line / to / care for / the / possible, / to / call it / a school of thought.”
Our lives might look just as strange as Sloat’s pages: dark swirls hiding messages handed down like an inheritance we should reject, new moons emerging as backdrops for our stories, colored dots breaking through where once there was only fog. Others might read our lives and beg for a Stephen King story. Instead, they observe the ski-slope handwriting of a child plotting their course across a classroom chalkboard for the first time.
Sloat’s work demonstrates that however we order our own chaos—great or small—we must cultivate discontent with the passive work of reading and being read. Let it be replaced, she says, with the recycling and repurposing of words and stories. Teaching us to see past letters on a page to the spirit inhabiting them, the final pages of Hotel Almighty whisper, “Now go and do likewise.”
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