Overview

In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

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9780822362722

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Reviews

This book is a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. Like Audre Lorde, Gumbs writes for the complexity of her vision. -- Jaki Shelton Green * NBC News (NBCBlk) * Gumbs seamlessly moves between historic reference, inherited memories, and a series of visions or a journal of dreams-the result is bigger than text itself. Her writing blurs the lines between past, present, and future. The book communes with ancestral knowledge while offering conjectures of what could be, reminding us that Black women have always seen what comes next, past the edges of what seemed or seems possible.... Spill is first and foremost a love offering to all Black women, but all readers who bear witness will leave its pages knowing of radical imagined possibilities and the difficult path laid before us toward elsewhere: 'our work here is not done.' -- Zaina Alsous * Bitch Magazine * Gumbs's poetry takes up the detritus of the everyday that surrounds theory - the affective social and political worlds in which black feminist theorists write - and bends it, splits it, like a prism breaking a beam of light into a rainbow. -- Maria Velazquez * The Cascadia Subduction Zone * Spill is poetry that invites the reader to imagine these poems weren't written- they was lived, they were felt, and in some deep sense, re-membered. In other words, this book happened in somebody's body, a body committed to Black Feminist ways of knowing and feeling in the world.... By embracing and applying these through the form of the parable, Spill speaks to the radical, spiritual power that belongs to those 'black women who made and broke narrative.' -- Lara Mimosa Montes * Poetry Project Review * Inspired by the work of black feminist intellectual Hortense Spillers, Gumbs' collection of poems appear as a series of powerful scenarios. Reading the volume is akin to being a member of a theatre audience. The fourth wall is peeled away and one is suddenly witness to heartbreaking, inspiring and insightful scenes depicting fugitive black women and girls - unsung and celebrated 'sheroes' - seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. -- Thomasi McDonald * News & Observer * Spill is not just a poetic collection where art meets criticism or where art is criticism. Instead, it is an intricately woven, polyvocal, ever-expansive map that details and gives rise to new and old black feminisms instructing us how to live and move with(in) these proliferating epistemologies. -- Sasha Panaram * New Black Man (In Exile) * Gumbs's writing has luscious urgency and rhythmic drive, which will make it of interest beyond its titular audience. -- Barbara Hoffert * Library Journal * With Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs pushes the boundaries of art making and scholarship, doing so with rigor, sure-footed conviction, and an open heart. -- Samiya Bashir In this luminous, heartbreaking work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs highlights the art of Black feminist theorizing, showing us how Black feminism lives in the hair and legs and wombs and choices of individual Black women. -- Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, author of * Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature *

In this luminous, heartbreaking work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs highlights the art of Black feminist theorizing, showing us how Black feminism lives in the hair and legs and wombs and choices of individual Black women. --Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, author of Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature

In this luminous, heartbreaking work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs highlights the art of Black feminist theorizing, showing us how Black feminism lives in the hair and legs and wombs and choices of individual Black women. -- Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, author of Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature With Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs pushes the boundaries of art making and scholarship, doing so with rigor, sure-footed conviction, and an open heart. -- Samiya Bashir Gumbs's writing has luscious urgency and rhythmic drive, which will make it of interest beyond its titular audience. -- Barbara Hoffert Library Journal

Author Information

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.

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