The Center For Hierarchical Manufacturing and We Are Primary Colors

Authors: Brenda Iijima, Annie Won, and Marcy Rae Henry

Publisher: DoubleCross Press (2023)

Two chapbooks bound together. Edition of 250.

“We found ourselves writing about chemistry while also really writing about gender while also really writing about race while also really writing about science’s insistence on formal taxonomies that impact sentience on every level. We went down every rabbit hole that appeared. We rode every unstable elevator up to the roof. We confronted our personal histories, then transmuted them. Along the way we met Lucy, Molly, Diana and Eve, etc. We reacquainted with our mothers, biological and otherwise. We encountered strictures and we broke through them to arrive at booby traps lingually, conceptually and psychically. We traveled through technicalities, beyond camp, beyond hysteria, into a region filled with laboratories brimming with emergent forms of presence and thinking. What we forged is a biotechnical fable of personhood.”

-Annie Won and Brenda Iijima

We Are Primary Colors gathers urgent poems of political activism and solidarity, of travel, of lockdown, of selves present and selves left behind. Formally exuberant and communally engaged, Henry’s writing captures a seeking, restless intelligence that builds meaning by weaving between continents and between languages. Braiding memory with astute perception, these interlingual poems capture the anxieties and the beauties of twenty-first-century global citizenship.