Don't Let Them See Me Like This

Author: Jasmine Gibson

Publisher: Nightboat Books (2018)

In Don’t Let Them See Me Like This, Jasmine Gibson explores myriad intersectional identities in relation to The State, disease, love, sex, failure, and triumph. Speaking to those who feel disillusioned by both radical and banal spaces and inspired/informed by moments of political crisis: Hurricane Katrina, The Jena Six, the extrajudicial executions of Black people, and the periods of insurgency that erupted in response, this book acts as a synthesis of political life and poetic form.

"Reading this collection is like listening to love poems on a dock while watching transnational cargo ships on fire and sinking. And in these poems, I find relief from my survivor’s guilt and surrender to artificial light; the midpoint of a blues. Here there are no gods of private causes. Just words dashing on our behalf, only a breath’s distance in front of the beast."

–Tongo Eisen-Martin 

"What to do when you are in the middle of class war? — You will have to hold courage, sensuality, and fear as one dialectical entity, yet watch this entity slip from your hand. This book chronicles this slippage and its resistance. Gibson outlines the abuses cities mired in Capitalism impose on their inhabitants. She does that aided by heavy metal goddesses and devouring lovers. Gibson is a love port addressing its violent failure: a stunning and unsettling book."

–Maghed Zaher