0.
afferent bursts of that bloody eddy
ship me back
to breath
the things and their unbridledparts
becoming life-dealers
spellboundin parchment
(guttered && &&
gutted &&&dis-organ-ized)
we make the best of our nostalgia
in the name of radical traditions
current quantumsbjust cant grasp
what if i do & die?
neither the book nor the very idea of the grammar book can hold it back.
Fred Moten
wordtomydead is a practice in black feminist poethics. using a 1940’s mechanical typewriter, sadé mucks up orthography to investigate disorienting practices of refusal and wade through the fundamental feltness and unintelligibility of thingness.
the concrete poetics deployed on/with/against the typewriter serve as scores for plenum sociality: your head stretches to the page, eyes squint, tongues stutter as you read the cascading letters falling off the margins you race to find understanding to rest on. you may find yourself spinning in circles, zigzagging across the page, deciphering what you can and being jolted by the static of what recedes from you.
roaring through this project is an embodied feeling of black study, an illegible, unspeakable, and unreadable social aesthetic practice.
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sadé powell is a native new yorker and antidisciplinary poet, exploring fugitivity, legibility, and interobjectivity through visual and concrete poetry. inspired by her upbringing, she uses the sonic, kinesthetic, and linguistic elements of her 1940s mechanical typewriter to experiment with dissemblance as proximity and relation to otherwise potentialities. sadé holds a ma in performance studies at nyu tisch. her work can be found in Kolaj Magazine, and Tiny Spoon.
to want to riot so much more than matter wants to matter so riotously, so differently, so invaluably, that it runs over itself in tremble, buzz and moan. neither the book nor the very idea of the grammar book can hold it back. flow clots to spill at broken natural tempi. surfacing abounds the letter’s natural twists and turns. what we get is supernatural flower. no petition for recovery, then a gig; just verbal streetlife in the common wind repeating: wordtomydead, by sadé powell.
Fred Moten
In a style reminiscent of M. NourbeSe Philip in Zong!, sadé powell asks us to not only read the words and characters but also the spaces comprising the page. I love a text that requires your whole body to approach it, a text that makes you question what it is to read, and to be read. Standingly firmly within the tradition of Black experimental aesthetics, wordtomydead is an invitation to be in conversation with powell and the text to make your own meaning. It's a ritual, one that requires return and continued engagement such that new understandings reveal themselves with each read. powell's question, "what am i unbecoming?" has taken hold of me, and I suspect it won't be letting go any time soon.
Jehan Roberson
Like a palm reading, sadé powell’s wordtomydead intoxicates the meaning and the limits of flesh. Riding a liminal radio frequency of knowledge—supernatural, ancestral, ancient, displaced—powell and her typewriter hum along at low decibels, “yieldingtothetongue,” of the text, reverberating off of and rearranging all that comes into contact with its “neon sap”. Rooted in antidisciplinary forms and somatic architectures, wordstomydead jailbreaks systemic measures of comprehension and the alphabetic principle. The psychopomps of powell’s poetics reveal for us a new pattern of unlearning.
Gabrielle Rucker
Artist Book, Chapbook
Hand-bound. 32 pp, 7 x 9 in
Publication Date: June 01 2023
Distribution: Direct Only