1. Color makes us forget the majesty of black,2. Yet that story and others that have been forgotten is carried in3. skin, and the skin is its mirror4. just as a number attracts its equal5. black hats vs white hats almost as simple6. as that, I learned to love wearing her black hat,7. To explain the technology of light and shadow8. Basically, something about seeing–caught in the throat,9. No narrative sublime required10. What grief can fit into a book?
Story of one who forgets she has forgotten
Erica Hunt
Feature Date
- December 12, 2020
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“Story of one who forgets she has forgotten” from JUMP THE CLOCK: New & Selected Poems by Erica Hunt.
Published by Nightboat Books 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Erica Hunt.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Erika Kapin
Erika Kapin
Erica Hunt is a poet and essayist, author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, published by Nightboat Books in November 2020. Her poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree, and Conjunctions. With Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is the editor of an anthology of new writing by Black women, Letters to the Future. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Capetown Program in Public Policy. She teaches at Brown University.
Brooklyn, New York
"Here, and elsewhere, the poet models how to speak directly, honestly, and without foregoing complexity. She observes and speaks of body language and grief, love and justice, in scenes that feel at once surreal and hyperreal. Reinventing itself at every turn, Jump the Clock is a master class in attention and engagement."
—Poets & Writers, Ten Questions
“Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, an invaluable gathering of pioneering poet, theorist, teacher, and activist Erica Hunt’s poetic oeuvre, is a treasure of lyric and analytic revelations and delights. A key figure in the Language Poetry movement, a pacesetter in late 20th and 21st century women’s writing, and a lodestar for Black innovative writers, Hunt in this collection expands poetry’s range and power and shows how to make the illegible legible. Or as she incomparably reminds us, 'What we do not dream we cannot manufacture.'”
—John Keene
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