Codi

“Forewords tell you about, thereby displacing, what you’re about to read. They postpone your reading in the interest of your reading so closely that you start weaving, so you can bring to light what’s not there in what you’re reading.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Every anthology is about what’s been excluded; these essays try to bring that close as they range from riot to recipe in their common refusal to be collected. In this sheaf, the truth of black cake has always already displaced the lie of the melting pot. In this bouquet, that truth is displaced, too. Such displacement teaches us all we can know about everything, which is that everything ain’t all; that everything’s not the erasure of exclusion but its management; that it’s not things but nothing that goes together, apart, after all. That’s why we have to look through what’s gathered here, which what’s gathered here facilitates. In this anthology, the incompleteness we desire breaks the brokenness we abjure.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

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

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