“Earthquake”

Iris Jamahl Dunkle created “Earthquake” from The Valley of the Moon by Jack London (1913). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Iris Jamahl Dunkle writes:

This erasure based on the first chapter of Jack London’s novel The Valley of the Moon is an act of recovery and resistance. I’d always admired how Jack London had written such a strong and realistic female character in the early 1900s; the novel has a strong female protagonist who leads her husband on a quest to find a home. However, during my research for writing a biography about Jack London’s wife, Charmian Kittredge London, I found out why the novel depicted women more realistically—quite simply, parts of the novel were written by Charmian. My erasure attempts to write the agency and voice of women back into this text.