Permanent Record

Naima Yael Tokunow

Paperback

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Pre-order: Ships Feb 11th, 2025

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A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices.

Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow's research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Record asks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring "possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity."

Book Details

Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publish Date: Feb 11st, 2025
Pages: 224
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
EAN: 9781643622422
Categories: • Anthologies (multiple authors)• American - African American & Black• LGBTQ+

About the Author

Naima Yael Tokunow is a writer, educator, artist, and editor, living in New Mexico. Her work focuses on exploring Black queer femme identity, kinship, and futurity. She is the author of three chapbooks, MAKE WITNESS (2016), Planetary Bodies (2019), out from Black Warrior Review, and Shadow Black, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown for the Frontier Digital Chapbook Prize in 2020. She proudly edits the Black Voice Series for Puerto del Sol and reads for POETRY Magazine. For selections of her work, visit naimaytokunow.com. She is blessed to be Black and alive.

Praise for this book

"The poems in Shadow Black move from startling moments of subtlety to satisfying passages of rant. Naima Tokunow is also a poet of the body, and in that tradition she calls for the liberation of the black body in particular: 'It refuses. It declines. It makes its own.' I'm so glad to have these poems in my life."
--Jericho Brown, Guggenheim Fellow & author of The Tradition

"Shadow Black eludes and surprises, a palimpsest against which Naima Yael Tokunow projects the difficult ontology of a lyric identity destabilized by paradigmatic forces meant to corral queerness and femaleness and the facets of a bi-racial identity. Tokunow is a limber lyric poem with a diamond-hard edge that will '...find the way to make teeth/and to open [her] mouth for them...'" --Carmen Giménez Smith, Co-Director of Cantomundo & author of Be Recorder

"Shadow Black's poems are tightly wound, angled with energy against their specific and deliberate forms, often prosaic, often menacing and eager for the soft mouth of a reader. Riding on the tension between academic, prophetic, elegiac and manifesto voices, Tokunow employs language that seeks moments of penetration and surprise. To experience this collection is to experience the myriad responses, violent and hopeful, to the projection hugging so much skin in America: Shadow Black." --Josh Roark, Editor of Frontier Poetry