Xandria Phillips, Poetry

Xandria Phillips. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, where they are researching and composing a book of poems and paintings that explore Black feeling and materiality. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their chapbook Reasons for Smoking won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Hull, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, is their first book. They are working on a nonfiction manuscript titled Presenting as Blue/Aspiring to Green, about color theory, gender, and modes of making.

Two poems from HULL:

“Elmina Castle”

at first only the rivers and I wept
for you in your journey, like the waters’
from tropical interiors, to the estuary
slap of the ocean’s cupped hands

and then your absence became religion
as easily as creating meaning from loss of limb,
you fell into crates that rustled from within
to the tune of the wind’s phantom chorale

“Sex Dream in the Key of Aporia”

I half-wake in sudor, queer vernacular forgotten in the sinew of sleep.
Wetted by a man whose saunter turns

………………………………………………………..my breed diaphanous,

I fasten myself to his shared anatomies while he ascribes me
to the shades of children we’d make.

………………………………………………………..Sex, my choice

harness for affection, I falter before unreining curiosity.
Trans time and space,

………………………………………………………..I follow the russet roads inside

myself, Accra lanced into my neural system still. My intra-continent sweats
through shirts, and drinks stout,

………………………………………………………..though it tastes of displacement.

I still have a penchant for what misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion.
Awake, I don’t conflate touch with knowledge,

………………………………………………………..so my projected selves approach

the helm as nimbus parts me. Their mission is simple.
I buck their tether

………………………………………………………..They tighten its hold.

from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3tiWW4s

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog