Description
Book SynopsisWail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black abjection. Readers find themselves in the belly of the whale, and in that darkness,
Wail Song asks readers how deep they are willing to wade in the water with blackness. The poems of Chaun Webster assume the world is not enough and is straining through each syllable, and with the end of the world in the rearview, they demand what we might do in blackened flesh with the time that remains.
Trade Review“Chaun Webster’s dead-ass brilliant Wail Song is a counter-elegy, not because nobody died, but because ‘the body is a corpse.’ Webster re-tells us of the wholesale whalefall of retailed Black bodies in the sea, that ‘dive from which they did not emerge.’ With steeled care, Webster bears those who could not be buried, an ark of history bent toward us, moving through the pitching pitch, the deep Blackness of his unfathomable imagination.” —Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
“The fluid musicality in Chaun Webster’s Wail Song emerges in the feeling of a sensual ensemble of black study, a new band of experimental poetics called neotropicalism, a movement made of depths and the impulse to, as the muses signal through Webster, ‘to make a noise from within the wake.’ It begins with engulfment, a philosophical question of meaning, sounding, and containment. The blue economy has its transactions in the ocean. Modernity has its transactions in blackness. It is an ontological collision of species on this planet, ‘a kind of riotous practice, an anarchy / of breathing,’ that flows in the quiet vibration of this collection. And this murmuring is pure wonder.” —fahima ife, author of Maroon Choreography
