Author: Rae Armantrout File Type: pdf In Just Saying, improbable and even untenable speakers are briefly constitutedonly to disappear. The result is part carnival, part nightmare. A television pundits rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord andor the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as chimeras, creatures that appear when old distinctions break down and elements generally kept separate combine in new ways. Here Armantrout both worries (as a dog worries a bone) and celebrates the groundless fecundity of being and of language.**

Author: Fred Moten File Type: pdf Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis.Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Stolen Lifethe second volume in his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single beingFred Moten undertakes an expansive exploration of blackness as it relates to black life and the collective refusal of social death. The essays resist categorization, moving from Motens opening meditation on Kant, Olaudah Equiano, and the conditions of black thought through discussions of academic freedom, writing and pedagogy, non-neurotypicality, and uncritical notions of freedom. Moten also models black study as a form of social life through an engagement with Fanon, Hartman, and Spillers and plumbs the distinction between blackness and black people in readings of Du Bois and Nahum Chandler. The force and creativity of Motens criticism resonate throughout, reminding us not only of his importance as a thinker, but of the continued necessity of interrogating blackness as a form of sociality. **Review Its this spirit of the collective effort of study and exchange and resonance, the effort to keep the channels open and keep listening, that has made Moten (or, maybe, Motens) such a celebrated thinker. At the end of sentences like these, you want to say something like Amen. (Jess Row Bookforum 2018-04-01) Review Fred Motens panpipe critical practice is nowhere more luxuriantly available than in Stolen Life. Diagnostic, ministerial, rhapsodic, it pulls out all stops to chase the farthest, fullest reaches of thought and language, criticalitys gambit. Moten returns the essay to its etymon, a radical trial, a radical attempt, what John Coltrane called pursuance, in flight for and toward something, which is as much what fugitivity (a prized word and concept between these covers) is as getting away, an unremitting search prone to unexpected turns at any point. Study is a word of choice in Motens work and he does indeed school us, take us to school. Weve been tardy at times, we learn, and weve even, on occasion, played hooky. No matter. He pulls right up outside our door, driving the bus. (Nathaniel Mackey, author of Late Arcade) Our friend Fred Moten, the prodigious philosopher, poet, collaborator, conspirator, critic, and fearless planner, extends to us a riveting, beautiful, and turbulent collection of essays. A massive and mobile series of meditations on the intramural and the undercommons, Stolen Life cuts a fugitive path toward the place where blackness and black study collude and collide with one another, offering us the blueprints to better hear the poetry of our ontology, and the ontology of our poetry. As precious contraband for this scholarly moment of emergency, this field-altering masterpiece is set to be played again and again. (Daphne A. Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 18501910)