Description
Poetry. Anastacia Reneé's FORGET IT draws the reader into the churning seas of dissolution — marriage, family, identity, livelihood — in language unknotted from the constraints of punctuation, syntax, sense— "eaten into seedless cherries"—and plunged into the fabular scape/scope of dreams, myth, fairytales, faith, race. Phantom births, ghosts, half-grown children, sex, betrayal, violence, anger, female body, the bloody aftermaths of dissolution sprawling, placental and umbilical, in the urgent, haunted language of dreaming and memory. City and speaker dissolve into one another, boundaries vanquished. What remains after dissolution? Talking to herself. From whence do (k)new form(s) arise? A "revelatory hymn", matrix upon which self and sense are (re-)configured as her own, Anastacia Reneé's FORGET IT dances on the grave of the lost—fiery tempest, a phoenix of language and presence. When we wake up, nothing is forgotten.
"This book feels like an entirely new invention. I don't even want to call it a book. I want to call it a thick-paint impressionist new word-reality, a documentation of whatever blush invented the first word. '...you picture yourself as a child seeing the color green for the first time.' Anastacia Reneé does just that, reinvents her reader as this child. This book is, to me, the color green for the first time. About this book, I feel something like what I imagine onlookers must have felt when they first witnessed the Wright brothers thrust air under wing to leave the ground."—Tara Hardy
Author Bio
Anastacia-Renee is a multi-genre writer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She is the recipient of the 2018, James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award for Washington artists (Artist Trust), and has served as the Seattle Civic Poet from 2017-2019, and the 2015-2017 Poet-in- Residence at Hugo House. Anastacia-Renee is a two-time Pushcart nominee and 2017 Artist of Year (Seattle). She is the author of five books: FORGET IT (Black Radish Books, 2017), (V.) (Black Ocean, 2020), 26 (Dancing Girl Press), Kiss Me Doll Face (Gramma Press) and Answer(Me) (Winged City Chapbooks, Argus Press) and has received writing fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Artist Trust, Jack Straw, Ragdale, Whiteley, Mineral School and Hypatia in the Woods. Her cross-genre writing has appeared in a TEDx talk and numerous anthologies. She teaches poetry and multi-genre workshops at Hugo House, libraries, universities, and high schools.
Author City: SEATTLE, WA USA