M. NourbeSe Philip: Zong! (2008)

“A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.”

Publisher Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, and Mercury Press, Toronto, 2008
Wesleyan Poetry series
ISBN 9780819568762, 0819568767
xii+211 pages

Reviews: Tyrone Williams (African Am Rev, 2009), Helen Klonaris (sx salon, 2011).
Commentary: Fred Wah (Jacket2, 2013), Janet Neigh, Phanuel Antwi and Veronica Austen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Evie Shockley, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (Jacket2, 2013), Jenny Sharpe (Interventions, 2014).
Interview: Paul Watkins (Toronto Rev Books, 2014).

Companion website
Author
Publisher
WorldCat

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Philip reading from Zong! (audio, 2007-2016)

Seth Price: Fuck Seth Price: A Novel (2015)

“In the course of a gripping, headlong narrative, Price’s unnamed protagonist moves in and out of contemporary non-spaces on a confounding and enigmatic quest, all the while meditating on art in a broad sense: painting, sculpture, film, architecture, literature, and poetry. From boutique hotels and highway bridges to PC terminals and off-ramps; from Kanye West and Jeff Koons to George Bush and Patricia Highsmith; from the playground to the internet to the mirror, Price’s hybrid of fiction, essay, and memoir gets to the questions of how we live now.”

Publisher Leopard, New York, 2015
ISBN 9780981546834, 0981546838
124 pages
via author

Reviews: Benjamin Lord (Art Book Rev), Liz Glass (CAA), Ross Simonini (Art in America).

Publisher
Worldcat

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Leonora Carrington: The Hearing Trumpet (1974–)

“The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature.”

First published as Le Cornet acoustique by Flammarion, Paris, 1974.

Introduction by Helen Byatt
Illustrations by Pablo Weisz Carrington
Publisher Exact Change, Boston, 1996
ISBN 1878972197
xix+199 pages
via psb

Commentary: Tobias Carroll (Paris Review, 2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2021-1-26)