What are you working on?
I’ve got a second book coming! Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023) is something I’ll be editing likely in the spring and summer, a dense sequence of sequences about central conceptions and narratives of Blackness—from my own here and now, and looking all the way back and down to the South. I’m lining up a few things for that. But lately, I’ve mostly been working on a translation, also for Brick Books, of Désormais, ma demeure, Quebec poet Nicholas Dawson’s third book. It’s a collection of hybrid essays, prose poem and photos so eerily familiar to me in terms of depression, diasporic contexts, and, among other things, masculinity, all inquired into with a kind of languid, readerly, lush, run-on lyrical essayism and interdisciplinarity I'm revelling in all over again as I work my way back through it.
Writing-wise, I’ve been increasingly trying to lean toward keeping it top secret / full in-the-dark mode. I’ll just say I’ve been thinking about the gravity of dominant groups as a subject for the dominated, and about dominant group readerships wanting to be addressees, wanting the symptoms of their gravity addressed, wanting to hear the dominated group describe the domination’s effects in heavy detail. I’ve been thinking about this particularly in terms of certain white people and whiteness and trying to cut across performances of all that and move on from them in a big way. I’ve got something cooking that’s working on that.
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