The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 Nico Vassilakis & Crag Hill, editors Fantagraphics, 2012 In her essay “Broken English,” Heather McHugh explores the role of fragment in poetry, including the artwork of English artist Tom Phillips in A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. Phillips’ work goes beyond simple erasure—the pages of A Humument are, with their patterns, depictions, and odd geometries, works of art themselves. Their attraction is visual, and within these images the observer finds, almost like speech bubbles, fragments of text. In McHugh’s words, these fragments of text “[allude] to the Romantic operation while performing a deconstructive one.” McHugh’s terminology of the Romantic and deconstructive came to mind as I approached the Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008. The twentieth century saw the dissolution of Romantic conventions of both image and language, and it’s fitting that, in the form of visual poetry, the new century would see the reconstitution of these fragments. In his introduction to the anthology, editor Nico Vassilakis writes, “Letters lose their chemical word attraction, their ability to bond …