Reading Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Erase Genesis feels a bit like I imagine it must have felt, allegorically speaking, to sample from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden: a progression of the mind beyond moral binaries, beyond good and evil, beyond even the concept of God, and into a place where creation occurs not by making something out of nothing, but by re-envisioning what was already there. For me, this may account for why, even after multiple readings, Erase Genesis feels like an encounter with the sublime. To “erase Genesis,” after all, is to rewrite the beginning, and to perform a radical creative act. In some circles, such an act might constitute blasphemy — though Howell herself clearly reveres the “original” (translated) text. In others, it constitutes a bold, though delicate, artistic vision.
Erase Genesis begins with “in the beginning,” and with the first three chapters of Genesis, in their King James incarnation, presented fully intact. The next sections rise and fall like a wave: chapters one, two, and three of the book also contain Genesis 1, 2, and 3, but the fourth and fifth chapters are Genesis 2 and 1 again. In each chapter, Howell “erases” sections of the source material by marking over the original text with strokes of watercolor paint. Howell offers three different erasure variations for Genesis 1 and five for Genesis 2 and 3, followed by another five for Genesis 2 and another three for Genesis 1. Though this method may seem complicated to visualize, I increasingly appreciated the structure of the book as I read and re-read. The use of watercolor, rather than digital means, to paint over sections of the original text, lends a certain care and deliberateness to the book. By subdividing each chapter into itself, Howell not only structurally mirrors Genesis 1 — which divides light from darkness, water from water, day from night — but also draws attention to words easily taken for granted in the complete text: words like behold, or shame, or or. In this way, the book shows that the end result of erasure may also be accretion, and that the painting of words is less a marking out than a writing over. Erase Genesis may be an erasure, but it is also a palimpsest.
Although Howell herself describes Erase Genesis as “a poetry of silence,” and one “that writes alongside a text I have loved my whole life,” the book is hardly subtle in its critique of readings of Genesis that support patriarchal oppression and religious dogmatism. In addition to Churchill Downs, Howell’s home state of Kentucky houses an institution whose mission, more or less, is a lionizing of a very literal interpretation of Genesis. Yet the book does not shy away from politics. Three words that are tellingly absent from the erasure are Adam, Eve, and God. Lord, however, appears throughout the book, and speaks with a very feminine voice: “And the Lord woman said” is the third chapter’s epigraph and refrain.
Howell’s choice of erasing the King James version of Genesis, rather than a more recent translation, also seems a deliberate strategy. On one hand, within much of Western Christianity, the King James version of the bible remains one of, if not the most dominant translations. It is respected both for its literary caliber and for the idea that runs, in some theological circles, that it is the only divinely authorized version of scripture. On the other hand, the idea of “domination,” specifically that which is championed by Genesis 1:26 – 28 in the King James version, is exactly what this book seeks to challenge. “To dominate,” Howell writes in the book’s postscript, “is intimacy’s opposite.” By erasing parts of Genesis, the book offers a way to respect, rather than to rule over, the beauty of all that has followed “in the beginning.”
I have read few works, erased or otherwise, that so capably radicalized calls for action against the climate crisis in the way that Howell’s art has. The fifth division of chapter three perhaps best summarizes this appeal: “But the man cursed every beast and seed…he said I command thee bring forth o.” Through its very title, Erase Genesis is a manifesto. It is ecofeminist. It marks the genesis of a form that does not shy away from the taboo of marking the unmarkable, or muting the immutable, or humbling the divine. Erase Genesis is a difficult book to classify, but it has made me think. A lot. I think of South Korean writer Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and “The Fruit of My Woman”: texts I recently taught and that might likewise be called ecofeminist, and (in the versions used) are similarly translated. I think of British novelist Ian McEwan’s Cold-War-era libretto “or Shall We Die?,” which presents the ultimatum of either turning toward a more feminine understanding of the world or facing total destruction. And as I consider a myth of origins from which God has been removed, I think not only of Nietzsche, but also of Gyorg Lukac’s Theory of the Novel — specifically to the idea that the novel is an epic ripened or matured to the point that the world has been abandoned by God.
Yet Erase Genesis is not a novel. Neither is it a work that embraces nihilism or divine abandonment. Rather, it is a book that calls for a revised understanding of what God is, and what creation means, and how humankind relates to it. Erasure, for Howell, is not an act of annihilation or replacement, but of preservation. The final words in the book are, in fact, “The book of Genesis can never be erased.” Clearly, Genesis is a book that should be treasured as a work of literature. Yet just as clearly, it is a book that can be, and has been, seen again.
POETRY
Erase Genesis
By Rebecca Gayle Howell
Bridwell Press
Published April 28, 2026
Southern Review of Books 