I Take Back the Sponge Cake

Poetry. Art. I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is a choose-your-own-adventure collaboration between poet Sierra Nelson and visual artist Loren Erdrich. Each turn of the page features an ink and watercolor drawing, a poem, and a choice between two sound-alike words that create a variety of paths through the book. The adventure always begins in the same place, but depending on your choices your reading experience moves by emotional meander--leaping, looping, and surprising until it finally reaches one of the possible endings. With its blend of words, artwork, and audience participation, I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is a triple threat.

"Erdrich and Nelson's collaboration is a delight. There's a perfect amount of distance between the poems and the images in this book--enough to allow for the snap of connection and the fizz of dissonance. Their lyrical choose-your-own-adventure invention asks you to choose between homophones to complete a given sentence, creating a surprising portrait of your own disposition at the same time that it produces multiple pathways to the book's splendid endings."--Matthea Harvey

"Antic, frantic, didactic, and seriously at play in a word territory Erdrich and Nelson make up, find, map, and inhabit. I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE invites anyone who wants to explore it with them to come along, providing handy instructions, guides, surprises, and illustrations, saying to anyone who's inclined to join in, there's plenty of room, you're welcome."--Dara Wier

"I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is an invitation to adventure in Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson's dream mystery. Allured and implicated by the sweet perversity of the mutable body, we're asked to hold rib cages, feel for faces in the mirror, take bunnies by the ears. Each page reverses the work of t