Latest Playlist
You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love
Playlist by Four Way BooksIn the center of wisdom made from crushing rocks against boulders, Harvey’s brilliant lyric lives in the resistance of black women whose presence on this soil is now in its fifth century. In You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love Yona Harvey shows how an original poetic lives in the marrow of the immortal bones of ancestry. The events of her life have moved the poet to write fiercely of her children and of loss, as well as the failures of the country where she was born. When the poet speaks to the soul sickness of men and of America it is with the generational wealth that is her inheritance, a wisdom that is the greater galactic mass to balance the more recent visions of black immigrants. Her voice is essential to making a cultural wholeness that would otherwise be impossible. This lyric, this unique, multimedia gift is evidence of an awakening only a few poets ever approach, an awakening that is the reward for an unfaltering belief in love’s profound nature.— Afaa M. Weaver 尉雅風
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Featured on January 18, 2021
Glaring
Playlist by Benjamin KruslingGlaring hurtles its reader deep into formal consideration’s command center, framing every punctum with queries of relation and autonomy. This text is a world where a title may hold as much as its referent, where the next work might begin inside its predecessor, where theater is stripped down to its circuitry and the charge within the performance of all language is laid bare. Benjamin Krusling’s nuanced graphical grammar is ecstatic in its quiet powers, and its scaffold of structural freedom finds tender affinity with the work’s overarching action—experimental reportage on explorations of an expansive interior landscape cracked open with softness. Throughout—heralding interiority and form—are a flickering bouquet parade of the unpaired insisting on their wholeness as is, insisting on their celebration as self. The work is ripe with fracturing’s urgency to show the ways of new wholeness, and blackness shines everywhere like slivers of light.
—Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
Featured on January 11, 2021
The Life Assignment
Playlist by Four Way BooksThe Life Assignment is, in its own startling terms, an ecology of late capitalist grief. . . . This outstanding first book, merciless in its beauty and wit, is a ‘schema for our lapsed world,’ a way to make sense of our ‘somber city’ and ‘the grief / we happen to be around.’—Urayoán Noel
View playlist to continue reading- I GIVE YOU MY HEART | OS DOY MI CORAZÓNRicardo Alberto Maldonado
- I, RICARDO, DETACHED FROM THE HUMAN RICARDO | YO, RICARDO, SEPARANDOME DEL HUMANO RICARDORicardo Alberto Maldonado
- LAST ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE LIFE ASSIGNMENT | ÚLTIMO ANUNCIO DE LA VIDA ASIGNADARicardo Alberto Maldonado
- AMERICA! AMERICA! | LAS DOS AMÉRICASRicardo Alberto Maldonado
Featured on January 4, 2021
Wild Peach
Playlist by S*an D. Henry-Smith"w/ you in the slow hour" is a long poem intended to be read in its entirety in one sitting, as slowly as you are willing, allowing each word to swell in your mouth as the beat unfolds & deepens into itself. I've read excerpts in the past, but this poem has only been performed once in collaboration with Yulan Grant/SHYBOI at Triptych, the closing event of experiments in sound and poetry at Basilica Soundscape, curated by Shanekia McIntosh and Joey De Jesus.
A working principle in my photographic practice, "w/ you in the slow hour" also informs an effort in making myself porous to potent stillnesses & finding collaboration in all things, as collaboration is all things. & then where it all meets: cascading blur & the shadow's sharp edge revealing themselves through the flow of language(s, spoken & otherwise encountered), challenging image & text to work together w/out illustrating each other, but to insist on sensory expansion, to insist on life in all its transitory states.
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