Overview

In their hybrid debut collection Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates stunning textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In their hybrid volume Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amid grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss. A revelatory debut volume, Arrangements collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, Raja Lubinetzki, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Octavia Rucker Gabrielle.

Full Product Details

9781964499390

Table of Contents

Reviews

""If in the space between mutter and Mutter a dying language is born, what is borne there - in the constant opening of carrying over, in the resonant silence of a mother and child reunion - is the sound space/practice room of Pan-African speech, which animates the gift from Esther Kondo Heller that you hold now in your hands. Held now in the violent conservatory that you hold, new tongues in your mouth, new flavors in your ear, are you in disarray? Yeah! It's her loving (re)arrangement of the collective head.""--Fred Moten

""Memory is the poem we live, not the poem we choose. Here, Esther Kondo Heller has offered a lost and found--a catalog of wondering--in which we can find the edges of our own losses and our own reach for language. Spend time here. Know that the space here is space for you, wide with the absences you hold.""--Alexis Pauline Gumbs ""If in the space between mutter and Mutter a dying language is born, what is borne there - in the constant opening of carrying over, in the resonant silence of a mother and child reunion - is the sound space/practice room of Pan-African speech, which animates the gift from Esther Kondo Heller that you hold now in your hands. Held now in the violent conservatory that you hold, new tongues in your mouth, new flavors in your ear, are you in disarray? Yeah! It's her loving (re)arrangement of the collective head.""--Fred Moten ""Ar: range: ments is miraculous in its ability to attend to silence and absence in such a way as to invite, at every juncture, a form of visitation. Esther Kondo Heller's deep lyrical listening and rapt seeking prove that grief is love that persists across all manner of distance. In these poems, grief becomes a gathering ground.""-- ""Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Life on Mars""

Author Information

Esther Kondo Heller is a poet, literary critic, and experimental filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, an Obsidian Foundation fellow, and a Ledbury Critic. They have an M.F.A. in Poetry from Cornell University 23' and are currently, a first-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where they are working on transnational Black poetics and translating the poetry of Black German poet Raja Lubinetzki.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available