Classic Crimes

The sophomore collection from poet and artist Sarah J. Sloat, whose Hotel Almighty was a NYT Editors’ Choice pick. Classic Crimes is a book of visual poetry sourced from William Roughead’s true-crime classic of the same name. In these erasure poems, “to face cruelty is a ‘melancholy accident,’” and “to sleep…[is] an interlude of little dinners.” Each page bears its own cunning erasure poem adorned in colorful mixed-media collages, the result a joyous and gleeful romp through time.