Read on Twitter
Good news arrives in the middle of catastrophe-- https://twitter.com/nightboatbooks/status/1247576533784498176
I am so grateful to the editors and staff @nightboatbooks for all the efforts they have made to envision this double-bodied book and bring it into reality -- and for the divine and drastic design--
I am grateful for @dchiasso for this review which highlights the book's mirror structure, in which each volume trades in exuberance for dismay, reading and ripping its own hair-- like Cassandra staggering around in Troy-- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/joyelle-mcsweeneys-poetry-of-catastrophe
"All poets write in language exhumed in part from their ancestors; in McSweeney’s work, prior language takes hold of a poem by seepage or contamination, in the stealthy way that “bugs, viruses, weeds and mold” do, going about their relentless work."
performs its secret ministry/unhelped by any wind, amirite?Thank you, Dan, for this close and vivid communique. And I'm grateful to the artist Anja Slibar for this portrait, the oracle hands that point two ways at once.
It's hard to celebrate anything, y'all, seeing the appalling racialized death rates emerging from Michigan, Wisconsin Chicago, Louisiana, and NYC, where black patients make up between 40-70 percent of COVID deaths, far beyond their percentage of total population
Just like Artaud predicted, plague, like the theatre, brings great crime to light. This plague is bringing to light the vast crime, the great crime-- the long genocidal tail of the enslavement and oppression of African Americans in this country.
This thread doesn't know how to end, history doesn't know how to end. The prophetess reels around in the burning city and doesn't know where her hair ends and the scream begins, the whirling motion, the cosmic air, the comet, named for hair, the slice of sound hangs scythe-bright
on air & doesn't end. It doesn't end.
