6/22/2023 0 Comments Hull by Xandria PhillipsThe poems in Reasons for Smoking articulate how living, touching, noticing, speaking, and remembering are necessary and subversive acts.”―Claudia Rankine When I read it, I am reminded of the ways in which language can be repurposed as an amplification device against narratives that seek to erase, bury, and diminish. This work positions snapshots of contemporary black, queer selfhood against an embodied historical backdrop in order to trace the tolls and infringements of white dominant structures and embedded historical violence upon the body. “’Let’s deflate something that we can all agree is / monstrous, and take its air inside us,’” writes Xandria Phillips in ‘Elegy for the Living and Breathing.’ A decolonization of space and self is made physical in this stunning, textured, and ambitious collection of poems.
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