As a Catholic, I have long “erased” the Book of Genesis—especially the King James Version. I’m not proud of my omission. In Pen of Iron, Robert Alter’s consideration of the fourth centennial of the 1611 translation, Alter lamented that the “decline of the role of the King James Version in American culture has taken place more or less simultaneously with a general erosion of a sense of literary language,” although he cautioned that he was “not suggesting a causal link.” For Alter, that grand translation helped form the prose and performance of Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, William Faulkner and other monumental stylists. 

Erase Genesis

by Rebecca Gayle Howell

Bridwell Press

160p $50

I appreciate the literary merit of those claims, but my interest in Genesis has always been more academic than spiritual. The King James Version has always felt staid to my ear and eye, and has never come close to stirring my soul. I often skim the text of Genesis, even in more conventionally Catholic translations, on my way to the more stirring books of Isaiah and the Psalms. 

For those reasons, I was intrigued to discover Erase Genesis, a new book of poems by Rebecca Gayle Howell. A Kentucky-born-and-raised poet, Howell grew up in Elizabethtown, a half hour from Thomas Merton’s monastery, the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani. Although their lifetimes did not overlap, Howell speaks of being drawn to the monk. “He once wrote that Kentucky is the center of the world,” she said in an interview. “I feel like I know what he meant by that.”

Howell’s book contains hand-painted reproductions of the text of Genesis with some passages obliterated, and the remaining, spare words cascading down the page to form poems. (It feels, and looks, more like an art book than a traditional volume of poetry.) “Loss has always been a part of biblical translation,” Howell has said, “be it by scribes who were behaving editorially or by insects or dust. I see all of them as collaborators.” 

Erase Genesis begins, somewhat surprisingly, with a full reprint of the first three chapters of Genesis. The decision feels like an affirmation that the text has a certain efficacy; it is like a gesture of respect. I read those chapters in my car while my daughters were at soccer practice in our forested corner of New Jersey. For the first time, the isolated text bore fruit for me: the anaphoric “and” capturing the litany of creation as I was surrounded by green, with craggy hills in the distance.

I was struck by how steeped Genesis is in the recursive language of cataloging and body form and flesh. I was reminded of how the words that announce the season of Lent—“for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”—came from Genesis 3:19. 

In his homily for the Easter Vigil Mass in 2026, Pope Leo XIV discussed how the account of creation in Genesis reveals how God brought “the cosmos out of chaos, harmony out of disorder and entrusting to us—made in his image and likeness—the task of being its stewards.” Before him, Pope Francis imagined such stewardship in an ecological vein, as well as through art and literature. I see Howell engaged in such practice. 

The paradox of any erasure is that the old text haunts what remains, especially a text as linguistically fundamental to the American imagination as the King James translation. For this reason, Howell’s project seems to exist in the tradition of midrash—the shaping of Scripture in light of contemporary concerns and creative interpretation.

Through Howell’s erasure, repetition is laid bare, as in her recasting of Genesis 1:22-29: “the earth/ the earth// the earth // said// Behold, I have given you/ the earth.” Linguistically, the earth—as divinely created space—speaks to us with a much needed reminder, a plea, for stewardship. Howell renders Genesis 3:11-24 with similar animation: “the tree// did// bring/ forth// the voice// saying// Behold.” God is not absent from these revisions. Rather, Howell’s renderings give sound and immediacy to the physical world, so that creation feels absolutely present. 

Howell’s work might be better understood as excavation rather than erasure, since Howell is neither adding nor truly removing words. She has described her process as a “natural element” of erasure through watercolor: “[E]ach page in the book is its own primitive painting. I ended up making and remaking the poems by hand, over and over, as I sought the right version of each painting.” The result is textured pages that seem not to hide Genesis, but to honor it through isolation of certain words. 

Perhaps this is not surprising. Howell has lived with the Bible for much of her life. When she “was eleven or twelve years old,” she writes, her “mind turned on, and reading flipped the switch. I wasn’t reading novels; I was reading poetry and the Bible.” Her parents were not readers; neither were they churchgoers. They worked “split sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, 363 days a year” at the family diner. Reading, then, was a sacred education for her; a genesis for a poet. 

In her postscript to these erasures, Howell considers the Episcopal theologian Ellen F. Davis’s critique of the King James translation of Genesis 1:26-28, especially the word dominion. For Davis, “mastery” is closer to the source text. Howell’s meditation is as theologic as it is poetic: “The change upsets the iambic pulse of the KJV,” she acknowledges. “As any English-language poet will tell you, the dactyl of ‘mastery’ evokes a growing feeling of weakness—not exactly what those translators were going for. The word ‘dominion’—with its voiced plosive ‘d’ start, paired with its climactic stress pattern—offers the reader liturgical change, both metric and metaphoric.”

Even more complicated for both Davis and Howell is the preposition over, as in “dominion over.” Davis revises the lines to: “exercise mastery among the fish of the sea, and among the fowl of the air, and among every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” and Howell feels that mastery strikes her more as to “exercise knowing.” Howell writes: “Be as the shepherd is toward sheep. To pursue knowing, among.” 

Erase Genesis is a welcome opportunity for readers like me to revisit Genesis with a new vision, one delivered by a serious poet with a spiritual vision. Howell ends her postscript with a pleasant truth: “The Book of Genesis can never be erased.” 

This article appears in October 2026.

Nick Ripatrazone has written for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and Esquire. His books include Ember Days, a collection of stories, and Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction.