Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight and THE ANIMAL’S PERCEPTION OF EARTH

Authors: Sherese Francis and Edwin Torres

Publisher: DoubleCross Press (2021)

Two chapbooks bound together.

Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight conjures both ancestors and futures through a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by Sol Sax’s exhibition Sol’Sain’t Many Kin: All Sol’Skin is a Free Kin. Like Sax's work, these poems interplay between black memory, art, mythology and history as well as reflect on presence in relation to the world, whether that world is the earth, the body, or our concept of self or language. Structurally inventive, prayerful, playful, and powerful, these poems praise and break language, loosing buried meanings and opening word-shaped portals.

THE ANIMAL’S PERCEPTION OF EARTH is both a long poem in sections and a manuscript of 28 formally diverse lyrics that, read together, function as a modular narrative of language sensing both its own shape and the contours of the world it inhabits. Torres' distinctive linguistic experimentation takes on the systems approach of ecology in these poems, flirting with and overstepping the boundaries between human and animal and between connotation and denotation. Connecting through ecology and fracture, continually turning like the helixes that encode all life, these poems invite and estrange, and ask what words do. 

Edition of 300