PERMANENT RECORD: Poetics Towards the Archive, ed. Naima Yael Tokunow
Before coming to this project, I had spent nearly adecade thinking critically about the Black American record (or lack thereof),and how my understanding of myself as a Black American, my family, and myculture has been shaped by what I can, and do, know through searching archives.These archives include materials from my family and the state, from papers andoral histories, and from political and artistic recordings. Many records aremissing, misremembered, or unfindable. Some are full and jumbled, hard to decipher.Most are couched in death, grief, and loss. This cannot be and is not the “fullstory,” although we are socialized to understand records as such, rewarded forreinforcing its “wholeness,” and often penalized for pointing to its deficiencies.Many have written beautifully about the wound of not-knowing—our homeland, ourpeople, our tongues, our separation from culture.
[…]
And so, Permanent Record hopes to apply the kindof pressure that turns matter from one thing to another by asking hardquestions: How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive andrecord? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to health? How do we pullblood from stone (and ink and shadows and ghosts)? What do we gain from our flawedsystems of remembrance? How does creating a deep relationship to the archiveallow us both agency and legibility, allow us to prefigure the world we want? Throughthis reclamation, we can become the ancestors we didn’t have.
Permanent Record wants to reimagine who isincluded in the archive and which recordings are considered worthy ofpreservation, making room for the ways many of us have had to invent forms ofknowing in and from delegitimized spaces and records. In doing so, we explore “possibilitiesfor speculating beyond recorded multiplicity” (thank you, Trisha Low, for thisperfect wording). This book itself is a record. The book asks what can becounted as an epistemological object. What is counted. Who is counted, and how.(“INTRODUCTION: Archives of/Against Absence: exploring identity, collective memory,and the unseen,” Naima Yael Tokunow)
Newlyout is the anthology
Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive
(NewYork NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), edited by Albuquerque, New Mexico-based writer, educator, artist and editor Naima Yael Tokunow. Since being announced as Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow back in 2023, Tokunow has put togetheran impressively comprehensive anthology on loss, reclamation and the archive,working to gather together elements of what had, has or would otherwise belost, pushing through conversations on what might emerge through and becauseand even despite those losses. “you spend a lot of time thinking about loss,”writes Minneapolis poet Chaun Webster, as part of “from WITHOUTTERMINUS,” considering if what is missing has / a form, wondering if there is amethod to tracing what is not visible. there was / a time when you thought thatif you just had greater powers of imagination, or / if you could somehow placeyourself securely along the tracks of family and / cultural history that youcould gather sufficient evidence, collect all the bones / to make something ofa complete structure.” Across a spectrum of lyric by more than three dozenpoets, Permanent Record speaks of a range of cultural and personal losses,from a loss of language, home and family, reacting to colonialism and globalconflict to more intimate details, writing against erasures both historical andongoing. There is an enormous amount contained within these pages. “In theobits mourning the billionaires,” writes Hazem Fahmy, a writer and critic from Cairo, in “THE BILLIONAIRE / (ARE YOU BOAT OR SUBMARINE?),” “it is mentionedthat they paid / $250k to die before the eyes of the entire world // alaughably cheap ticket / compared to the cost of carrying // a child onto afloating grave. Whose mercy / would you rather stake your life on? The ocean’s?”Onthe back cover, the collection self-describes as a “visionary anthology thatreimagines the archive as a tool for collective memory. Reflecting on identity,language, diasporic experiences, and how records perpetuate harm, thiscollection seeks to reframe what belongs in collective remembrance.” “When theceiling drops / the rain stops / beating down but / now you’re beaten down,”writes Okinawan-Irish American poet Brenda Shaughnessy (one of only a handfulof poets throughout the collection I’d been aware of prior), as part of thesequence “TELL OUR MOTHERS WE TELL OURSELVES / THE STORY WE BELIEVE IS OURS,” “thoughit’s the beat / that drops now / and we dance / in the rain / like sunbeams /made out of metal cloth, / tubes of blood, / and scared, sewn-up eyes.” Theanthology includes writing by more than forty writers, most of whom are basedin or through the United States and further south (with at least twocontributors on this side of the border in the mix as well: Hamilton, Ontario-based Jaclyn Desforges and Toronto-based Em Dial). The work in thisanthology is rich, evocative and very powerful, even more impressive when oneconsiders that the bulk of the list of contributors are emerging, with but asingle full-length title or less to their credit. Tokunow offers an expansivelist of contributors from all corners, with an eye for language, purpose; onewould think if you want a sense of the landscape of who you should be readingnext, Tokunow’s list of contributors to Permanent Record is entirelythat. Listen to the lyric of this excerpt of the poem “QUADROON (ADJ., N.)” byEm Dial, that reads:
QUADROON (adj., n.) languageof origin: once again, linguists spit their bloodied air: from Spanish cuarteron,or one who has a fourth. i pinch the linguist’s tongue and gawk at theway they betray themselves. not one who has three fourths. not thehaystack with a needle inside. instead, any drops of life in a sterile lakeare isolated and named. the lake’s volume is doubled again and again and againand again until science feels faultless renaming them Statistically Insignificant.
Theanthology is organized in a quartet of loose cluster-sections—“MOTHERTONGUED,” “FILENOT FOUND,” “THE MAP AS MISDIRECTION” and “FUTURE CONTINUOUS”—each of which, asTokunow offers in her introduction, “begins with an introduction of sorts—a lyricmap legend to the work within, inviting you to pull the threads of theframework through the pieces.” The approach, as one essentially lyric, isintriguing, offering a collection of writing sparked by purpose, but driven andpropelled by a core of stunning writing: Tokunow clearly has a good eye (partof me wants to ask: where are you finding all of these writers?), and knowswell how to organize material around a thesis. The introduction to the finalsection, for example, reads: “We have your number and all quarters. Fortune foldsus up—without a line to the dead we can hear the blood rushing, a cup againstour drum. The gifts we make ourselves (destiny or doom) hold up in flatdaylight, some familiar oath, some new contract: we are finger-deep in the sand,spinning and spiny, no new lines but this soft, fat earth. Still falling offthe page, we ziiiiiiip. We hold the mirror slant—sky and her big feelingsbounce. What can we mine of the future and if, oh not extraction, then what canwe lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” As San Francisco-based poet Talia Fox writes, to close the lyric “NOTES ON TIME TRAVEL / IN THE MATRILINEAL LINE,”as held in that same closing section:
the curse is simple, and itbegins with water
the water my mother bathed me in was crabwater (it is, after all, the water
alotted for soldiers andthe children of soldiers and their children and especially
their children)
like a spell, like aspell !
when i close my eyes i amwading through a shallow river at evening. i come|
across a forest clearingwhere bodies have been strung up, faceless, bobbing
in the trees
AsI mentioned earlier, more than forty contributors, and I was previously awareof only a few, such as poet and translator Rosa Alcalá [see my review of her latest here], Jaclyn Desforges [see her ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview here], EmDial [see her ’12 or 20 questions here], multimedia poet and author Carolina Ebeid [see my review of her Albion Books chapbook here], Phillippines-born California-based poet Jan-Henry Gray[see my review of his full-length debut here], Minnesota-based poet and critic Douglas Kearney [see my review of his Sho here], and Brenda Shaughnessy (all ofwhom I clearly need to be attending far better). The wealth in this collection isincredible. Or, as Brooklyn-based writer, playwright, organizer and educator Mahogany L. Brown writes as part of the expansive “THE 19TH AMENDMENT &MY MAMA”:
The third of an almostanything
is a gorge always lookingto be
until the body is filledwith more fibroids
than possibilities
