Tracie Morris has held Championship Titles in both the Nuyorican Grand Slam and the National Haiku Slam. Across these United States of Poetry, she is the most unforgettable, improvisational, harmelodic performer and poet. Intermission is the full-length print debut of her lauded live style, yet it pulls the reader to where the stage can not. The streetwise sass and boombastic Brooklynese are all here, but Morris also displays prowess and verve with riskier, lyric work.

Intermission

Literature & Fiction

Morris, Tracie

Poetry

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. Performance Studies. Hybrid Genre. Music. Foreword by Charles Bernstein. Includes digital download code for audio. HANDHOLDING: 5 KINDS is a collection of experimental poetry as a creative response to 5 artistic works by innovative American, African diaspora and European-based artists' work: Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (recited by his son, Ernst), Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, John Akomfrah's 7 Songs for Malcolm X, John Cage's 4'33 and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Each of these pieces strongly contextualizes Morris' own work and practice, dealing with the undertones and overtones of race, sexuality, class, gender, ethnicity, power and art-making. Each section is introduced as a reflection of what each piece means to the author and how they came about. The collection contains experimental text as well as 6 audio files (17 digital tracks). One is a "real time" response to the Kubrick film, the other is a collection of sound pieces inspired by the other artists, often recitations of the page-based texts. This is the first text and sound collection of Tracie Morris' that is comprised of exclusively experimental work inspired by other innovative artists.

Handholding: 5 Kinds

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Kore Press

Weaving intimate portraits of home with what could be the travel journals of a 21st-century troubadour, Tracie Morris's human/nature poems is a hymn to the human and more-than-human world. These poems bear the record of a state of heightened perception, springing from the displacements of travel and returning, of memory and its triggers, of global pandemics, ecological catastrophe, political unrest, and mourning. With great precision and abundant insight, Morris articulates the seam of our "human/nature": "Sol has hands in Cairo, in Luxor / today He Rises. I wonder where / the outstretch lands. It matters knot / what circles your head. What your / kin says is power. Aspects of ever / lasting light, life is always made from parting." "Tracie Morris is the genius poet of the double-dutch: crafted, elegant, urgent, playful, fun, and musically timed. In human/nature poems, Morris dismantles gentrification, climate violence, space/history travel, ancestry, and inspires us to look at our relationship to what we call 'nature,' and what we deem 'human.' Our memories are stirred toward ice, discoloration, and with the simple act of opening a refrigerator, we are in the middle of an epiphany, in a constant state of departure even as we arrive. This book is a journey into the future, a requiem, and a boomerang. My advice to you, reader, is not to jump in late. Straight up: Tracie Morris has her ear to the earth as it murmurs, struggles to breathe, and never lets us forget."--Willie Perdomo, State Poet of New York "Tracie Morris' human/nature poems calls us to deep and spacious attention for everyday rituals of wonder--our "small seam of certainty" in the midst of gray breath and human ceremony. For 'we walkups [who] rarely get time to clear our heads,' there is pulled-from-the-world language to flip expectation, 'a mirror of starling wings' to sing."--Ching-In Chen, author of recombinant "Attentive to the human being's subjectivity interacting with the physical world's materiality, this poet's perspectives are local and global. The work unites hemispheres of earth and brain as it incorporates a wondering mind in a wandering body. How do we impose our will on the physical world? How do we acclimate to variable conditions? Regarding the movement of human consciousness in space and time, an implicit focus of the poet's attention is the always-shifting interplay of subjects and objects as groups and individuals respond to changing environments: gentrifying neighborhoods, travel destinations, seasonal variations, the anthropogenically altered earth."--Harryette Mullen, from the Introduction Poetry. Environmental Studies. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies.

human/nature poems

Litmus Press

Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. Art. Performance Studies. "In WHO DO WITH WORDS, poet, performer and critic Tracie Morris joyfully and instructively blerds out in her love letter to and lecture on Black speech acts. Riff-reading as philosophizing, she dialogues with J. L. Austin, Samuel R. Delany, and many others, dropping serious science in the process. A pocket-sized delight, and she keeps it tight!"--John Keene"With hip talk and logic, Morris lays some shine on the be in our being as Black folk, writes us a love song for our lingo and a manifesto for making it plain. She asks all of us to flip the script with finesse, to hold the bullshit of public discourse to a flame and make art from the funky embers. Finally, a philosophy we can get down to. Like a quilt full of codes to crack and spill. Like a cowrie on the divination board of Black genius."--Yolanda Wisher"'Who dis?'Y'all know her, or them.We've been there done that.What J. L. Austin try n think aboutWhat Jacques Derrida try n think more aboutTracie Morris just got it down--listen up yo this is it.Enof said, but ain;t it true, 'natural' language don't do neutral especially when it says it is.Taste this TM signature cocktail of 'Ebonic colloquialism' & rhapsodic perspicuity, n see how her spirited speech counteracts the Ivory colonialism of 'RP' to a stunning effect, blerdy cool."--Prof. Kyoo Lee

Who Do With Words

Essays & Correspondence

Chax Press

Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. Performance Studies. "In WHO DO WITH WORDS, poet, performer and critic Tracie Morris joyfully and instructively blerds out in her love letter to and lecture on Black speech acts. Riff-reading as philosophizing, she dialogues with J. L. Austin, Samuel R. Delany, and many others, dropping serious science in the process. A pocket-sized delight, and she keeps it tight!"--John Keene\n"A visionary, a medium, a storyteller possessed of extraordinary perlocutionary powers, capable of locating and seizing upon a listener's every exposed nerve ending, Tracie Morris is a word magician who can make virtually every utterance into music and manifesto. Face it, all of her manifestos are love tones, for this is how she speaks, what she stands for, what she embodies whether on a stage or in a classroom or a cypher or chatting on the subway. Everyday speech and the poem are collapsed, along with the unconscious, dreams of freedom, the will to exist. WHO DO WITH WORDS simply gives us an even more powerful map to the sunlit, non-binding and non-binary world Blerds have been seeking for centuries."--Robin D.G. Kelley

Who Do With Words (2.0)

Poetry. Book + CD. African American Studies. "RHYME SCHEME calls out to Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie John and Amiri Baraka's Blues People as it responds to patterns of representation by entering deeper to dismantle and rebuild on its own terms black life, black love, black sound. What accumulates in the sonic chains of these poems is the life and language a community lives and loves. In 'Southern Son of Man' Morris writes, 'I think of you and I think home.... The bad in me gone, heart-made haven, you.' These pulsing trickster lyrics moving backwards and forwards in time at all times are for us and everyone."—Claudia Rankine

Rhyme Scheme

Zasterle Press

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