Description
Book SynopsisEngaging with the work of M. Jacqui Alexander and Black feminist thought more generally, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's
M Archive is a series of prose poems that speculatively documents the survival of Black people following a worldwide cataclysm while examining the possibilities of being that exceed the human.
Trade Review"
M Archive adds to and extends the critical work being done around breath, breathing, and blackness. And in so doing, it gives us a reason to breathe – independently and collectively – again."
-- Sasha Panaram * New Black Man (In Exile) *
"Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a literary treasure.
M Archive, the second book in an innovative trilogy that began with
Spill, is evidence of her brilliance." * Bitch *
(Starred Review) "Groundbreaking.... This is an impressive archive 'written in collaboration with the survivors' and the mythology that Gumbs develops from the artifacts of future black life and memory works to reveal an existence 'on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.'” * Publishers Weekly *
"The end of the world is no joke! This text is clearly ambitious. More compendium than chronicle, the writing is poetic, dense, and often solemn with glimmers of dark wit." -- Gabrielle Civil * Full Stop *
"Offers a set of necessary and stimulating interventions . . . A generous work that challenges dominant views that assume that ancestral speculative work has no place in feminist theory." -- Chandra Frank * Feminist Formations *
"At turns lush and awesome, in ways that make the eyes gleam and the mind crackle with electricity, in ways that devastate and leave the spirit raw with overlain feelings of complicity and responsibility, and loving, always loving, always loving in, between, and across every single word—the beautiful and daring writing of
M Archive imperatively continues the constellar work of radical Black feminism’s ongoing project of 'imagining the unimaginable.'" -- John Murillo III * Make *
"[G]round-breaking. . . . Gumbs’s trilogy embraces the lyric beauty in the acts of naming, remembering, and finding one’s way back to the source. . . . Reading Gumbs’s books feels like reading an archive that will someday, who knows maybe even someday soon, usher in an era of radical transformation." -- Kathryn Nuernberger * West Branch *
Table of ContentsA Note ix
From the Lab Notebooks of the Last Experiments 3
Archive of Dirt: What We Did 31
Archive of Sky: What We Became 71
Archive of Fire: Rate of Change 89
Archive of Ocean: Origin 105
Baskets (Possible Futures Yet to Be Woven) 133
Memory Drive 185
Acknowledgments 213
Notes 217
Periodic Kitchen Table of Elements 227
