Codi

“Goddam, Milk, I do believe my whole life’s geography.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“When have the born again not doubled down on death?”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Knowledge of the invaluable is prior to the experience of being-(de)valued. The invaluable brings value online, after all, as a bad thought or a kind of vicious offspring. It’s just that the experience of being-(de)valued helps us not forget what we already know. What we already know is given in Jacobs’s refusal to buy herself, but it persists even in those who have to buy themselves, even in those—like Jacobs—who have to sell themselves, when what we already know motivates the transaction. Take this. This is not my body. There’s no such thing. It’s not that it wouldn’t be better if it were. It’s that it wouldn’t be good enough. Blackness is a blessing of the bodiless, just as indigeneity is a blessing of the landless. They form neither repertoires of countermeasures nor collections of counter-subjective standards. They dig transverse earth and flesh to displace the total situation. They make a book like a museum for durational art, formed in walking through curational air. “The music is happening,” Monk says. “I don’t need to play.” Live album. Light blue. Bright, Mississippi flowers.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Being-valued, which is to say being-devalued, emerges in the proximity of things. There’s an evil you and I can’t get away from. Sometimes you and I want to call it home, collapsing our presence into an absence of extension, an instant of argon blue, where and when all our things can be accounted for. And insofar as subjects have a place and time they have a price. This is the private imperative of an American rebirth predicated on expropriating birth’s radical impropriety so it can clock how we keep having played that tune tomorrow.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive