The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void
Author: Jackie Wang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2021-01-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781643620367

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.In The Sunflower, Wang follows the sunflower's many dream guises-its evolving symbolism in literature, society, and the author's own dream life using a mathopoetic technique to generate poems using the Fibonacci sequence (a pattern found in the seed spirals of sunflower). The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void embodies what Wang calls oneiric poetry: a poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams. Although dreams, in psychoanalytic discourse, have been conceptualized as a window into the unconscious, Wang's poetry emphasizes the social dimension of dreams, particularly the use of dreams to index historical trauma and social processes.

For Pleasure

For Pleasure
Author: Rachel Jane Carroll
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2023-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1479826731

"For Pleasure argues that aesthetic pleasure and formal experimentalism hold the twinned capacity to maintain a global racial order and also to undo it"--

Peripheries: a Journal of Word, Image, and Sound, No. 6

Peripheries: a Journal of Word, Image, and Sound, No. 6
Author: Sherah Bloor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2024-02-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 067429629X

The Center for the Study of World Religions Peripheries Poetry Series publishes contemporary poetry, alongside fiction, visual art, sound works, and archival material. Peripheries 6 includes a folio, "Anti-Letters," as well as works by Victoria Chang, Aracelis Girmay, Joanna Klink, and Tracy K. Smith, among others.

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun
Author: Jackie Wang
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2023-11-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1635901928

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang’s singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot’s Fool, with a leap of faith.

Dreams in Double Time

Dreams in Double Time
Author: Jonathan Leal
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-07-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1478024585

In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.