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The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void

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2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY

2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST

Jackie Wang’s magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

ISBN-13: 9781643620367

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Nightboat Books

Publication Date: 02-02-2021

Pages: 120

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.50(d)

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Table of Contents

Life Is a Place Where It's Forbidden to Live 1

Death as a Survival Technique 2

The Evil Noodle 6

Companion Species 8

Instead of Thickening My Skin I Buy a Neon Balaclava 10

Refuge 13

The Future Is Between Us 14

Without Tongue 17

The Band of Insurgent Angels 22

The Resurrection of Angela 23

Survivor Trauma 26

Wounded Adjudication 28

Panic at the Disco 31

The Chase 33

Preliminary Notes on the Marxist White Boy Recognition System 35

My Dream Ate My Homework 37

The Museum of Cacography 39

The Sewer Rat Counter-Haunts the Prison by Nesting in Society's Collapsing Aorta 41

Dead Letter Day 43

The Pink Phallus 46

An Inventory of Oneirogenic Herbs and Substances 51

An Inventory of Scenes from Oneirogenic Herb Dreams 52

The Covert Apocalypse 56

Sowers of Discord 59

Cunt River 60

A Difficult Apprenticeship 62

Why Grieving People Are Drawn to Water 67

How the Egg Loses Its Shape 68

Damnation 69

Willow Sisters 71

What Will You Eat? 76

How to Shed the World 81

The Phantasmagoria of Failure 83

Creatures Abandoned by Time 85

How to Measure Use Value 88

Waiting for Godel 89

The Death of Thurston Moore 91

Creation Story 96

Dreaming in Papyrus 97

The Coral Tree 98

The Storm 100

Being Is Without Shelter 103

Masochism of the Knees 105

Fucking on the Cow 106

What Did She Want to Prove? 107

Because There Is Silence 109

The Vernacular of Our Bodies 117

Natura Non Facit Saltus 120

[A Moment Breaking Loose from the Past Becomes the Voice Inside Your Head] 122

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void 127