By Bacopa Literary Review 2023 Poetry Co-Editor Reinfred Addo
This piece, “1040A” by Sara Adams, is very understated. It’s not very ‘artsy’-looking, in the most obvious perception of what an artsy piece ought to look like. However, there is a certain X factor in its non-artsiness that makes it very artistic. The subject itself, IRS form 1040A, was a form used (prior to tax year 2018) by people in the USA to file their income taxes manually/on paper. True, taxes don’t exactly inspire artistic rapture, yet, Sara Adams somehow turns this bureaucratic, boring item into a thought-provoking visual statement. Taxes, money, and bureaucracy, seem to find themselves in every facet of our modern lives. If art is meant to shed light on the human condition, then what better subject than that which affects us all? Adams uses erasure to remove most of the text that would be found on a 1040A form, and leaves only a few words that, when combined, perhaps reveal the frustrations brewing in a person’s life.
The lines of the form are very straight and clean, implying orderliness and high functioning-ness, much like the outward appearance that humans in a capitalistic world are taught to project. However, the form’s words themselves speak to the messy and complicated nature by which we often actually exist. Adams creates the statement “check here if you or your spouse will not change”, followed by a check box for You and a check box for Spouse. Is this form perhaps giving us a glimpse into a difficult romantic relationship as it’s being experienced by the tax filer? Does “will not change” suggest that finances are causing strife and magnifying a personality trait that is causing a strain in the couple’s relationship? There is also a section that reads “head of household is a child”. This may suggest that either the head of household acts like a child even though they are an adult (another personality trait straining the relationship), or that there is an actual child in the home and most of the financial, emotional, and time resources go towards raising that child (I’ve often heard the saying that one’s time and money are no longer theirs once they have a child).
Sara Adams’s excellent use of erasure reveals that not all may be as sanitized and organized as the straight lines and neatly stacked spaces of our lives would suggest. “1040A”, then, perhaps, is a warning that the paper that is our outward façade may look crisp, but the ink that writes our stories may fade and run when exposed intensely enough to the pressures of life.
About the contributor: Sara Adams’ chapbooks include Poems for Ivan (Porkbelly Press), Western Diseases (dancing girl press), Think Like a B (Trump erasure poems; SOd press; free to download!). and six Ghost City Press Summer Series Micro-chaps (also free to download). Check out more of Sara’s work, including chapbook links, at kartoshkaaaaa.com.
Sara Adams was awarded with an Honorable Mention for Visual Poetry in our 2023 edition.
