Nat Raha // Kay Gabriel // LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Please join us for a night of poetry as we celebrate the publication of apparitions (nines) by Nat Raha with special guests Kay Gabriel and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.
Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.
“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.”
—CAConrad
“Describing and defying the murder of experimental gathering requires and allows syntactic variety, paratactic flare. What you can hear in Nat’s nonet9 is dressed to kill, extravagant, and spare. For all we’ve ever wanted, all we’ve ever needed is a weapon to share. In apparations / this is unconcealed, & open,, && laid bare. Seeing that we haven’t just been seeing things is rare”
—Fred Moten
“Like a sculptor releasing the figure from the stone, Nat Raha breaks and chips away at language to liberate and unleash the hidden, layered meanings that nest within the anguish that is english. Through the inherent restraint of the niner, apparitions both complicates and clarifies the contesting and lasting forces of empire, allowing us to “re/assemble[d] our/affections and solidarities/our cracked, efflorescent hands.”
—m. nourbeSe philip
“This is a book that imagines (and refuses to imagine) survival, in spaces that serrate recollection, that don’t require their occupants to be embodied subjects. Nat Raha is a brilliant writer who upholds and generates incompleteness as both ethics and terrain. Book as scream. Book as frequency. Here, in the book, we might ‘remember what we live.’ Not how.”
—Bhanu Kapil
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines, countersonnets, and Octet. Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature, on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.
An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.
In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.
Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She is the author of Kissing Other People or the House of Fame and A Queen in Bucks County. She coedited, with Andrea Abi-Karam, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (all Nightboat Books), which was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. The editorial director of The Poetry Project, Gabriel lives in New York City.
Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement.
In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of “survivor,” getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.
A writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of Village (Coffee House Press), TwERK (Belladonna) as well as the co-editor of Coon Bidness/SO4. Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center and at festivals. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium. Diggs has received a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Whiting Award (2016) and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She lives in Harlem and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College and Stetson University.