Orifice of Return

Orifice of Return is a collection of poetry that posits Black femme bodies as living and breathing archives, corporeal manifestations of intuitive and intellectual claims at survival. The poems in this collection illustrate the multifaceted nature of my craft, through which the personal, the collective, and the political are commingled, but wrestling forces. As Audre Lorde declares, there are many kinds of open, the poems of this collection are orifices, textual portals, spatial and temporal fissures, and entryways into Black past, present, and future. These poems use received forms (the ghazal, the ode, the cento, the obverse, litany, etc.) and employ stylistic devices like (direct address, song lyrics, colloquial speech and slang, etc.) These poems interrogate histories and imagine speculative futures for Black folks. They exist in lineage— familial, imagined, literary ancestral, and with the theoretical underpinnings of Black feminist hauntology and Toni Morrison's "rememory." Some of these poems are lyrically driven, while others are performance and rhythmically driven— all facing inwards and outwards, aware of the world they exist in.