Author: Erika Hunt
Designer: Ana Cordeiro
Purpose: Writing Series
Retrieved from: http://www.centerforbookarts.org/bookstore/broadside/detail.asp?pubID=283

Kyle Schlesinger covers the different types of broadsides in his essay. A broadside is usually defined as a large sheet of paper that is printed only on one side. Broadsides were normally used to announce information such as political movements. A description of total immersion broadsides is included in the essay. The image include in this post is an example of total immersion for various reasons. According to the essay, a broadside that depicts totally immersion is one where the “text can act as an image or an image can act as text” and together they work to portray a message. In this image one can see different objects; overall these objects look like books. Some of these are opened while others are closed. On this book there are pieces of writing; however, there is now direct order on how to or when to read each piece of text. Even though the lines of text are horizontally aligned they are somewhat scattered all over the broadside. The author is challenging the traditional way of writing a poem because instead of making the reader read the text from left to right and up to down it is challenging the reader to find a way to read the text in a way that makes sense. Also, if one took each piece of text they would be difficult to read on their own because statements or phrases are separated from the stanzas which they belong to. For example, with no direct sense of direction the reader may find it difficult to decipher when to read the phrases “closer than”, “inside condensed”, and “pointing upstairs”. When I first took a look at this broadside I when to the middle stanza, then read the phrases and tried to understand what the poem was about; nevertheless, it did take me a minute to understand what the poem was about and what stanza or phrase came next.