Description
Book SynopsisA collection of psychedelic poems inspired by Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, exploring the slippage between her image and legacy across time, place, and space.
A Beauty Has Come takes the reader on a sonic exploration across desert plains and resonant soundscapes as Nefertiti, “The Beautiful One,” comes into being and Blackness on the page. Written from within the physical limitations of lockdown and informed by her work as a psychoanalytic student, Jasmine Gibson’s poems are a surrealist playlist drawn from the mystic and the viscerally real. Utterly rejecting the lies and logic of capitalism, this book invites the reader to look deeply into the unconscious life of this world, before shaking it off in the spirit of resistance and joy.
Trade ReviewA Beauty Has Come swallows up popular music, theory, psychoanalysis, image upon image, to open, like a mouth, poetry’s page. These poems target who defines and configures power, its liberation, redistribution, asking ‘who’s violence protected and birthed you?’
A Beauty Has Come enacts a poetry past poetics, for some thing—if it be a thing—another turn of absolution at the end of the world—to arrive. —Jos Charles
A Beauty Has Come altered my imagination around what is possible in the poem—not just in terms of shape or aesthetic style, but with regards to sound. The instrumentation of the poem, a commitment to musicality that does not ask the narrative of a poem to suffer. This book rewired my brain in the best way. —Hanif Abdurraqib
A Beauty Has Come is a visionary book of life, born of ‘the courage of being a Black woman in love.’ It teems with mothers, past and future; the planets whirl through the poems; it loops through the numberless deaths out of which the poet’s life has been made, and emerges singing a kind of cante jondo of spilled blood and clear, starry nights. —Chris Nealon
“With the piercing lilt of an avenging angel, Jasmine Gibson delivers an incredible second collection that delves into the anti-blackness of the western collective unconscious, the coloniality of linear time, and the eternal possibility—necessity, rather—of operating from a place of abundance, pleasure, and solidarity. Gibson's gothic futurism propels the reader into a swirl of transmuting images so resonant with each other they feel like built structures. Inhabiting them guides one out of the isolated maze of affective scarcity and vulgar materialism into a radical sacred clearing shaped by ceaseless change.” —Manuel Arturo Abreu
"Gibson could fill collections with weapons-grade contempt, but she dares to hope for connection, collectivity, and “A Call And Response” of “(Black Sound)”: “I am what I am when I am / With you,” she swears... [Gibson] counterbalances clear-eyed dissent with the highest aspirations for aesthetic and political liberation." —Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation
