Poetry. Film. "By turns heady and heartfelt, sardonic and spectral, INFRASTRUCTURES, the second book of poetry by Elizabeth Hatmaker, has all the hallmarks of a cult classic. In its pages, the poet interweaves images of Chicagoland with Midwestern industry's wasteland scenes, infusing them with ghost voices haunting AM radio, examinations of contemporary academia, obscure movies and film scores, critical theory, preoccupations with seedy characters like Bob Crane, and provocative recollections of the infamous lovers' retreat—the Sybaris. In poems that inhabit liminal spaces where art and lived experience become indistinguishable, Hatmaker explores Joyelle McSweeney's question, 'Can the body be possessed by media?' And as we descend with the poet into the shadowy highwayscapes of southbound Interstate 55 in the necropastoral tour de force poem Requiem, we, too, become possessed by the 'fictions / between the words where people go missing, / go dead, go / buried and gone under.' Late in INFRASTRUCTURES, the poet asks, 'Do you hear / the difference between an explosion in the movies and in your life?' It's no yes-or- no question but the call to attention that this wild, dark book makes. She half-teases, 'My comma is my slit on the material,' and the book seeks to account for such pauses—in fidelity, in politics, in the stutter she understands to exist in the soundtrack which would seem, she suggests, to make all seem possible. In commerce and in mortality itself. The book delineates awareness of all that that splice stands in for and in awe of, all that versus the desire or feeling of obligation, Hatmaker writes, of some men and women to 'blow through the spaces between the words in order to give a more rounded sound to the language.' Gentle reader, be forewarned: no spaces are blown through here. 'If you're not nervous'—as Miles Davis may have said—'you're not paying attention.'"—C.S. Giscombe "Elizabeth Hatmaker's vibrant new book INFRASTRUCTURES is a feverish exploration of the specters conjured by media. Here, reality is production and postproduction, and Media and Life do not so much interact as stage and restage a proliferation of social rites. Perry Mason, childhood insomnia, Bonnie and Clyde, and windy Midwestern streets are spliced together as passionately as the sights/sounds in later Godard films. In INFRASTRUCTURES, we are watching ourselves watch others watch us. A perfect book for our times."—James Pate "In INFRASTRUCTURES, Elizabeth Hatmaker 'noses on toward / someplace that is / not here.' How could her poetry be anything other than brave? Skewered by contradictions, we navigate her alt worlds, sketched through cinema and inhabited through intellect. Yet she cycles through places visible to anyone looking around. Desire in Chicagoland's tri-state zone flows through highways all dub and juxtaposition. Sybaris proliferates up and down the map—because this city famous in Greek mythology for pleasure seeking and luxury has reappeared as a hotel chain dedicated to Midwestern adult romance. Toying with another thing most insistently here, Hatmaker plucks at regulatory language, then drops its noise elegantly by the wayside. She pursues instead a 'living range / between / static and audibility.' What most amazes me about Elizabeth Hatmaker is her tremendous humanity, a constant, urgent transgression animating all her poetry. Love and death are fucked up. Somehow it's a beautiful ride."—Kristin Dykstra

Infrastructures

Literature & Fiction

Hatmaker, Elizabeth

Poetry

Downstate Legacies

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Sade LaNay's HÄRTE is a straightforward and deliberate book of questions that--through generative translation and transceptual writing--cajoles readers to reconsider what can be gleaned from the brevity of innocuous interrogation. The follow up to their acclaimed debut DREAM MACHINE, LaNay's HÄRTE is a poetic sequence, a deft and edgy snare, risking everything to replicate linguistically the Sehnsucht survivors of trauma embody. Imbued with flecks of doubt, guilt, antagonism, and estranged desire, HÄRTE evokes the friction of language against language, interpretation versus misinterpretation, what one heard with what was said--how a perpetrator lingers and forces a survivor to define the borderland--perhaps the only heartland left to inhabit. "What if the roots of language were revealed to be rot--read red--and the rooting of any self rotten-read flocking together? What if the asterisks of etymology catapulted us into a world not of origins but of unbeginnings, unmorred identities, mistaken selves taken at face value? Read sound for face, read failing or flailing for value. This is the world into which Sade LaNay's minimalist and often mercilessly accurate poetic interventions lead us, with straying astral risks, a world where one language is taken for another--is lost in another--durchquert eine andere--queers another whole-härtingly, confronting the violence in the mono-logical linguistic structures with which we go about censoring and self-censoring our daily lives and bodies. HÄRTE sings the singeing of new pathways through sabotaged sound--from poor to Porree to leak to Leaken. Are you redlich for it?"--Uljana Wolf "Sade LaNay's brilliant HÄRTE appears at first to be an instructional language book consisting of abusive sentences, but the German 'translations' sonically permutate the sentences into beautiful, haunting, poetic statements that counteract, expose and undermine the violence of the English. With HÄRTE, LaNay finds in translation a moving survival strategy."--Johannes Göransson "Sade LaNay writes from the space between the vulnerability of strength and the strength of vulnerability. Confident, revealing, beautiful, and painful. HÄRTE contains a subtle linguistic music and brutal confrontation. It's impossible to resist LaNay's poetry."--Aase Berg "A challenge for those addicted to monolingual work, Sade LaNay's fascinating new collection, HÄRTE--German for hardness, cruelty--contains uncanny tercets composed between languages we mis/take and carry beyond linguistic convention. HÄRTE is the soft wax become hard seal, the malleable word violated to make an impression, trauma spoken in the confabulation of a generative translation con/founded to forge prolific signification. Trans/duction, trance/formation: musical, mystical, and harsh verse to be chewed in the mouth and the mind."--Lisa Rose Bradford

Harte

LaNay, Sade

Fiction. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Drama. African & African American Studies. Afrofuturism. "When you chose to alter the history and ideology that has and continues to oppress you, you choose the path of a creator," writes special issue guest editor Sheree Renée Thomas in her introduction to OBSIDIAN'S SPECULATING FUTURES: BLACK IMAGINATION AND THE ARTS. "Under the powerful lens of Afrofuturism, the impossible is possible. It is creative alchemy. The spirit and rhythm of a culture is preserved and transformed; the past is not only contested but sacred space." Winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) 2018 Parnassus Award, which recognizes significant realization of editorial mission, SPECULATING FUTURES includes fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, scripts, visual art & more from African writers & artists around the world, including Sofia Samatar, Tochi Onyebuchi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Walidah Imarisha, Nisi Shawl, Isiah Lavender III, Krista Franklin, and Sheree Renée Thomas, among many others.

Obsidian's Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the Arts

United States

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. African & African American Studies. Art. Music. OBSIDIAN'S WHAT TELL FREEDOM NOW offers three folios from editors Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and Douglas Kearney. Celebrating the ingenious work of contemporary literary giant and MacArthur genius grant winner John Keene, editor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews presents the folio "Counter/Narratives: An ASAP/10 Roundtable in Conversation with John Keene." Documenting conversations at the New Orleans ASAP Conference roundtable, Andrews contributes to a sustained engagement with Keene's work, experimental Black art, and the "broader and ever-unfinished task of writing (and re-writing) Black historiography." The folio closes with a response from Keene. In the folio "What Do We Tell Freedom, Now? Emancipation & Art," editor Khanyisile Mbongwa invites writers, curators, and artists to "share their perspectives on emancipatory practices. The contributors take us on various paths and reflections on the relevance of creativity within the spectrum of emancipation." This work coincided with Mbongwa serving as chief curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale, allowing her to "to explore and examine what the cre-ative industries offer to the struggle for liberation and, at the same time, how the Stellenbosch Triennale can position itself within the biennales, festivals, and megaexhibitions existing in Africa and the world." For the final folio, "See What I'm Saying Is: Writing + Image," editor Douglas Kearney invited writers to select a song from Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun and compose a cover using text and image. Following this opening of the folio, the section "Unprompted, But On-Time" consists of work composed without prompting. "More specifically, what's gone down up in here is the contributors have worked writing + image, as in writing writing into image, writing and/by/with/along/on/under/over image, and even photographic images of writing in which the textual object's depth and width isn't simulated by vectored stacking, but feral in the three-dimensional world."

Obsidian's What Tell Freedom Now

History & Criticism

OBSIDIAN'S RADIANCE features four folios celebrating writing and arts of the African diaspora. Fiction folio "Radiant Youth: Stories of Light & Darkness," edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, explores and reveals what it means to be a child and how the experiences of our youth can impact and linger, even into our adulthood, sometimes for the rest of our days, complicating what it means to be a Black child living in a world that every day seems to want to remove you from it. The special section guest edited by Nancy D. Tolson with Wesley Jacques, "Visions & Words for Youth," invites questions, doubts, and challenges to the status quo with regard to how we read Black children. The annual Furious Flower Poetry Prize folio, judged by Kei Miller and introduced by Lauren K. Alleyne, celebrates the winner, honorable mention, and finalists, whose words, Gwendolyn Brooks might say, move with "wicked grace." Also included is an Editors' Folio, with new poetry and visual art. Poetry. African & African American Studies. Art. Diaspora. Anthology.

Obsidian’s Radiance

Arts & Photography

Obsidian’s Heirloom: Preserving HBCU Futures

Obsidian’s GenderQueer/GenreQueer Playground

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Books by Downstate Legacies