Awaiting

Charisse Pearlina Weston

ART, FEMINISM, NONFICTION, PLAYSCRIPT, POETRY  |  $20 $18

March 2023
Read an excerpt

I am thinking now      if, up from within the excess
             of this dream, the deep green sea
             tracing the boundary of inside and
             out will ever gather itself to speak
             through me?

I wear the former in pictures like a necklace,
like a pendent, a third eye from my first love:

he is not well and all that matters is that
he is not well. Not ever well. Or maybe
he is and I, in so believing in a kind of breath
that does not need breaking, am not. I do think
of him often. I am plagued for it. For him and
for others, for me and

   no! Do not touch me.
   No, touch me, [gently].

I want to drench the earth
with my viscous soul
hung in air by wire fuses.
I want yours reflected
I want everything I know
  I cannot have in abundance

  because I know myself, I know myself
  this self of the horizon line who cradles

      “I am moored along the soft,
      shored unity of impatient ruin”

  against a gathered throat as distance induced by silence.

Awaiting offers a snowstorm of ideas swirling around memory, silence, time, and darkness.

Poetry Foundation

Part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem, Awaiting begins by detaching phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangling them into centos or poetic remixes. Through the incorporation of these entanglements, original poetry, and a surreal landscape, what develops is a new work blurring the sightlines of narrative space by way of the spiral, by way of the fragment and the self-reflective slip of the fold into and out of itself.

About the Author

Charisse Pearlina Weston is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist and writer whose practice is grounded in a deep material investigation of poetics and the autobiographical to explore the delicate intimacies and reticent poetics underlying black life. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at notable venues including Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Bard College of Art (forthcoming) and solo presentations at Abrons Art Center, Project Row Houses, Recess, and the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University. She has received awards from the Artadia Fund for the Arts (2015, Houston), the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award (2014), and the Graham Foundation (2021). She was a 2019 Dedalus Foundation Fellow in Painting and Sculpture. She is the recipient of the Museum of Art and Design (MAD)’s 2021 Burke Prize and was also a 2021 MAD Artist Fellow.. Her work has been published in Spook, Art and Culture Texas, Pomona Valley Review, and Not that But this. She is the author of The Red Book of Houston: A Compendium for the New Black Metropolis and A Vessel. A Case. A Fruit, for Touching, and co-authored Fantasy Objects: an artist book of text and images (onestar press). She holds a MFA from the University of California-Irvine and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

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Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-98-5
Trade Paperback
80 pp, 8 x 8 in
Publication Date: March 15 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)
Series: Dossier