As We Know seeks to invert gendered trajectories of editorial intervention and appropriation as these have played out in the famous cases of figures such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson. At the same time, it repositions erasure poetics at the origins of (rather than in response to) a published text. Embracing Roland Barthes’ call for a “corrected banality,” we here present the most unmediated-seeming idiom—the diurnal, journalistic record—as itself the consequence of methodical and/or whimsical extraction. Nonfiction subjectivity emerges as the product of, not just the source for, erasure poetry. As in Barthes’ own elided memoirs, the resulting work calls into question exactly who we are and what we know.