In henceforce, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s poems take us on unimaginable voyages within and beyond the contours of our quotidian experience. This is not simply geographic travel, however: though Hilliard’s poems explore air travel, transcontinental locations, and even intergalactic scenes, their travel poetic asks us to move through and beyond deeply entrenched social boundaries. The movement depicted and encouraged here brings the reader into contact with figures that destabilize our notions of race, gender, and nation. Hilliard’s language, too, transgresses boundaries. For any reader who loves strange encounters with the familiar and the thrill of disorientation, these poems will prove challenging in a deeply exhilarating way, asking the reader to question the limits of their gaze, their language, their sense of place, and ultimately to reaffirm their personhood.

"Kamden Hilliard crafts an avant-garde 'travel poetics' that not only traverses airports and locales across the Pacific, Asia, and the United States, but also transgresses the normative and secured borders of nationalism, gender, aesthetics, and language itself. Throughout, we encounter multitudinous 'portraits' of radical, queer, black, and American selves in all their desire and pain, fear and freedom. In the end, we continuously arrive henceforce at the fluttering dream of 'flite Fruitility Pozsibility.'"
—Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory [guma’]