Join us in welcoming Ra Malika Imhotep and Dexter L. Booth as they discuss their collections of poetry gossypiin and Abracadabra, Sunshine
About gossypiin:
gossypiin is a Black feminist hypertext that registers the feeling of an experience of the world in which the self is an unstable plurality continuously unmade. It is a story marked into the flesh of the poet, transferred onto the page through a process of distillation. It is an enactment of Black feminist poetic utterance that tends to the inside parts. This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbaceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments, and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined, and remixed, the poet reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation and survival. gossypiin performs an interruption of the narrative silence around sexual harm and the mark it makes on Black femme subjectivity.
About Abracadabra, Sunshine:
Abracadabra, Sunshine is a series of ever-turning letters written to lovers, friends, and family as a testament to human perseverance and to art-making as a continuous defiance against the often overwhelming complexities and hardships of existence. Darting from the Czech Republic to the Andromeda Galaxy, from the films of Godard to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, these poems foreground our animal need for love and connection against the background of our historical obsession with destruction. By turns dour and deeply hopeful, Booth's poems extol the communal and healing powers of vulnerability and love.
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Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia. As a scholar and cultural worker, Ra is invested in exploring relationships between queer articulations of Black femininity, Southern vernacular culture, and the performance of labor. As a steward of Black Studies and Black feminist thought, Ra dreams, organizes, and facilitates spaces of critical reflection and embodied spiritual-political education.
Dexter L. Booth is the author of Scratching the Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was selected by Major Jackson. Booth’s poems have been included in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2015 (edited by Sherman Alexie), The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, and The Golden Shovel Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Booth was a finalist for 2016–2017 COG Poetry Award. He was awarded an artist residency at Yaddo in 2017 and another at the MacDowell Colony in 2018. Booth is currently a contributing editor for Waxwing Journal, a PhD candidate and Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, and a professor in the Ashland University MFA program.
gossypiin and Abracadabra, Sunshine will be available at Lost City Books!