i am like a radio, channel of my own
it has to keeprewriting itselflike any viruseverybody wants toget away fromthe thing they knowthey must encounterbefore moving aheadto the next leveli keep meeting peoplewho sayi don't want tofeel guiltthen feela higher thingi thinkit seems i meetpeople all the timewho are simultaneouslyfascinated by blacknessthe exotic homegrownand terrified at the comingdevastation of timewhen kali comes onthe scenewe are boundfor devastationno one can starethe black literarygoddessin the eyeand come outanything otherthan stoneyet everyonecomes outas angels of dustsometimes toowhen world isburningsuch as nowin the medium of self-immolationno one knows what to beso here come thegreat blacktwin flamefidelitya clutch of hornstiny brass bitsof soundmorsels of clayhere come alittle staticlightfor a spell
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- March 6, 2024
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“i am like a radio, channel of my own” from SEPTET FOR THE LUMINOUS ONES: by fahima ife.
Published by Wesleyan University Press on Feb 06, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by fahima ife.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
fahima ife is a devotional poet and lyrical essayist. She is author of the poetry collection, Septet for the Luminous Ones, the chapbook, abalone, and her debut hybrid collection, Maroon Choreography. She has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and other places. Her work has been published and celebrated in The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and more. fahima is associate professor of Global African Aesthetics + Poetics, and director of the Black Studies minor in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she teaches cosmic courses on music and performance, cannabis aesthetics, goddess rituals, radical storytelling, poetics, and Love. fahimaife.com
Middletown, Connecticut
"ife's new work...both extends and reframes the transhistorical spatial imagination of their earlier sequence 'porous aftermath,' which listens and bears witness to fugitive spirits, ancestral presences who escape the plantation economy and navigate the bayous of southern Louisiana. ... [It] answers the call of ancestral presences to 'elevate our dead.' 'the new black art is this ―' writes ife, 'find the lost soul and love it."
—Brian Teare, Kenyon Review
"Spectacularly allusive in its canny, concise segments, sometimes programmatic but more often simply learned, ife's 'tremulous / antegrammatical' work invokes 'the black morning of baldwin / across the river in another country.'"
—Stephanie Burt, The New York Times
"fahima ife's Septet for the Luminous Ones conjures space for the black queer body, where critical thought, creative practice, and the building of intimate communities blur in radical engagement. These poems are boundless in form and as they expand, they also magnetize, imploring us, 'come on/sense it!' And when we do, we get to be as wild and empathic as ife is in this book. These are jams, rituals, notations, enchantments for those of us who 'want poems that love.'"
―Renee Gladman, author of Plans for Sentences
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