Jasmine Reid
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Deus Ex Nigrum
With its flora crossing boundaries, Deus Ex Nigrum is, above all else, an invitation to bloom. This chapbook of poems holds a speaker remapping her body, which travels from a site of betrayal to one of renewal. Enacted here is an interlocution of self and body, a configuration outside of canonical human experience, a trans speaker who so finds posterity & futurity in the surround of human being: flowers, seasons, satellitic cyclings. These poems, forever embarking on the commute between monster and human, paint for us the hypervisibility and interior awe that accompany a trans femme’s movement through urban landscapes. Despite being rooted in Baltimore and Brooklyn, there is an unmistakable pull towards the botanical and the cosmic. These poems take us upwards and outwards, coiling and opening with a kaleidoscopic preference for synergy, oceania, and beauty. There is a persistent vulnerability which accumulates & allows the text to arrive upon a new speaker, one who knows herself & says, "here is who i am. i am. i am."
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