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A reprint of the intersectional black feminist classic by the late poet and performer Akilah Oliver.In her original author's note to the 1999 edition, Akilah Oliver writes,"What I am trying to do in these poems is investigate the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness (as both a personal identity and a non-essentialist historical notion), sexuality and language." the she said dialogues: flesh memory proves to be not only still timely twenty years later, but essential reading for understanding intersectional politics and poetics in our current moment.
"Don't expect sense from these poems, in which grief, politics, literary theory, and sexuality interweave. But do expect language surprise and beautiful metaphors. . . . When [Akilah] Oliver presents her experiences in metaphor-rich language, the reader feels what she feels: incredible loss, infinite pain."--Library Journal "An extraordinary gift for everyone."--Alice Notley Written for her son, Oluchi McDonald (1982-2003), Akilah Oliver's poems incorporate prose, theory, and lyric performance into a powerful testimony of loss and longing. In their journey through the borderlands of sorrow, they grapple with violence, find expression in chants, and, like the graffiti she analyzes, become a place of public and artistic memorial. "If memory is the act of bearing witness," she writes, "then the dream is a friend driving us somewhere." Akilah Oliver is the author of the she said dialogues, recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn and curates the Monday Night Reading Series at the Poetry Project.
In this third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Each opportunity for productivity is a personal call-out; she responds, "diligent and strict." A repetitive stretching exercise produces sectional meditations on obedience to self, and to ambition, and the limitations of he body as container, while the obligation to include others in one's apprehension of the room, or self, causes Wagner's slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation to slide from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. "Things mean, and I can't tell them not to." What's going on inside is a watchful self-regard that invites eros to play. Further exploration takes Wagner close into sexual fantasy- the desire for a debased object- and the politics thereof: "Well I expect you to go into the/ fucking human tunnel/ I'm going." In each of the four series that make up this book we find a female body watching itself and marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.
The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United States In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!
For more than thirty years, Ana Castillo has been mesmerizing and inspiring readers from all over the world with her passionate and fiery poetry and prose. Now the original Xicanista is back to her first literary love, poetry, and to interrogating the social and political upheaval the world has seen over the last decade. Angry and sad, playful and wise, Castillo delves into the bitter side of our world--the environmental crisis, COVID-19, ongoing systemic racism and violence, children in detention camps, and the Trump presidency--and emerges stronger from exploring these troubling affairs of today. Drawings by Castillo created over the past five years are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. My Book of the Dead is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. History is really an invitation / by way of arranged language / to read the occulted / in plain sight: / a poem. // This book is a commingling of archives / with copious attributions / without peer review or a known market. / A history in which the document / is contemporary nonfiction / represented in verse // language's contemporaneity taken back / from archive-as-Empire's governance / and my poem journals are archival.-from CODA
Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women’s literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship. Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.
"One part love letter, one part eulogy, Overdue tells the story of America's public library system . . . Amanda Oliver proves herself a vibrant new literary voice . . . This is a book for all book lovers." —Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth When Amanda Oliver began work as a school librarian, fueled by a lifelong love of books and a desire to help, she felt qualified for the job. What she learned was that librarians are expected to serve as mediators and mental-health-crisis support professionals, customer service reps and administrators of overdose treatment, fierce loyalists to institutionalized mythology and enforced silence, and arms of state surveil...
An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau) Winner of the Bollingen Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”