A book of transition--poetic, political, religious--and its always radical implications.Occupied with trans spirituality, the genocide in Palestine, and the manifold intricacies of queer love and struggle, the poems in imogen smith's second collection, raw & zero, open up an unabashedly musical incitement to take a stand on honest ground. At the heart of this collection lies the tensions between the philosophical and the erotic. Language unspools throughout long form pieces influenced by concrete poetry, as the poet plays with a sense of shape, space, and symbols. With raw & zero, smith charts medical transition, a budding Islamic practice, and civic resistance, felt in the book's themes of meaning-making, hope, love, lust, identity, and community alongside personal, regional, and global grief.
About the Author :
imogen smith is a poet & transsexual. She is the author of raw & zero & stemmy things, both published by Nightboat Books. They believe in a free Palestine, a borderless world, & trans power.
Review :
"raw & zero, in brain, braid & bract, is exemplary proof of the poem as a devotional node: arrayed with pristine consciousness, Kyger-striped like the fiery Costus flower, a double-edged sensuality like the late Sinéad / Shuhada, & the most mentally vasodilational sense of enjambment. Keep it open, imogen. & you too, Reader."--Aristilde Kirby "This is devotional poetry, straddling the erotic & religious, affirming human connection. smith believes empathy strengthens the soul, that feeling broken by the news & all that's collapsing persuades your soul of its worth, as long as you've oriented yourself properly (in your sex, writing, & political lives). smith's "acts of devotion to the material world" grieves friends' deaths & deaths our taxes paid for, demanding that past & future reconcile."--Evan Kennedy
"raw & zero is a book of ecstatic verses contemplating spiritual & trans personhood, an erotic poetics insisting that everything is holy, the asshole is holy, the "transsexual revert" is holy, the jouissance of the mixtape is holy. imogen offers us a vision of God as emoticon, sort of like a creepy ghost with four eyes. This is a deep exploration of divine mystery."--Julian Talamantez Brolaski
"With a hundred & one reasons why we have our hands & faces in the dirt, imogen smith's poems grow as if their natural habitat is with herbs & flowers, fruiting bodies & vegetation. These unashamed verses are a study in erotics & belonging, the poet a "constant student to desire", reminding us that change is a continuum, beginning in our own bodies. An invitation to open every node, synapse, orifice & petal. God is Earth--wade in."--Nat Raha
"dear imogen--i'm thinking about how "evenings are for sex & soft drugs," how you & i both "belong to god," how the word profane can also mean ordinary, routine, & how yr poetry refracts & distributes an ecoslutty gospel--& i'm doing all this while sucking on a rock still warm from the sun. love, tatiana."--Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
