Nicole Sealey began making erasures from the US Department of Justice’s 2015 report detailing bias policing and court practices in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, three years after the murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police. She revisits that investigation in an act of erasure that reimagines the entire original text as it strips it away.
In August 2014, Michael Brown a young, unarmed black man was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report that was filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and practices that have become commonplace from disproportionate arrest rates, to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. It is a report that remains as disheartening as it is damning.
Now, acclaimed poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background weighing heavily on the language Sealey has preserved it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains.
is an engrossing meditation on one of the most revealing texts of modern times.
Nicole Sealey won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021 with an excerpt fromThe Ferguson Report: An Erasureearning the judges' praise for creating 'new moments of lyrical beauty and contemplation' out of 'stifling obfuscations' to shine 'a light on all that the report tries to hide', with Shivanee Ramlochan calling it 'a poem of resonant cultural and social value'.
(2017), is published in the UK by Bloodaxe at the same time.
Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure comes to us first in fragments – at times not even syllables, ah or id – but as a feeling, the unsayable constructing itself as we read along or listen. The paced rhythm is almost painfully made as if fleshy blips on the heart meter – a ghostly master text beneath. One feels subliminal truths cumulate out of a visceral engagement, and then the emergence of eight inspired poems.
-- Yusef KomunyakaaNicole Sealey was born in St Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of ordinary beast (Ecco, US, 2017; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the ferguson report: an erasure (Alfred A. Knopf, US, & Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023). Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016), was the winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. Excerpts from the ferguson report: an erasure have appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation and Poetry London, while 'Pages 22-29, an excerpt from the ferguson report: an erasure' won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021. Sealey's honors include the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, the 2021 Granum Foundation Prize, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial and Poetry International Prizes, as well as fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, MacDowell, the National Endowment and New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Project. Sealey served as the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017 to 2019. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. In 2017, she started The Sealey Challenge, an annual online community challenge to read one book of poetry each day for the month of August.
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