Description
Poems that traverse and transgress borders of nationalism, gender, and language
henceforce: A Travel Poetic moves from spaces of affective and historical elision to navigate the increasingly global world. Scenes of air transit, public space, and the eternal stickiness of desire identify systems that produce and uphold race-nation scripts. These poems are mattered by a capital world and their language seeks to make something kinder from their surroundings. henceforce thinks passage a precious, dangerous thing—henceforce just wants to be safe, to arrive home.
Hilliard crafts an avant-garde ‘travel poetics’ that not only traverses locales across the Pacific, Asia, and the United States, but also transgresses the normative and secured borders of nationalism, gender, aesthetics, and language itself. Throughout, we encounter ‘portraits’ of radical, queer, black, and American selves in all their desire and pain, fear and freedom. In the end, we continuously arrive henceforce at the fluttering dream of ‘flite Fruitility Pozsibility.‘
Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory [guma’]
Review
About the Author
Excerpt
Kamden Ishmael Hilliard earned a BA in American Studies from e University of Hawai’i at Ma?noa. Kam helps with Jellyfish Magazine and Big Lucks while earning an MFA at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Kam’s previous publications include two chapbooks of poetry: A Travel Poetic: distress tolerance and Perceived Distance From Impact.
ODE 2 THE AFFECTIVE
A spin of modern panic sets the day strain /2jacket The
sadass stone Squalor guild Str8 stoic as my A-line FISA who
Cannot confirm my need 2 dent up a few neural certainties
BUT EFF IT DID it wouldn’t share
The day is a “total top”
After, it showers me in Wellbutrin
praise Haldol praise
Amphetamine Salt daze
of my [now] collective common adder Hiss hiss How now do my brain hurt
I hav the rite paranoia
4 1 attorney b provided
4 me: What kinna wo rd is do ngl e? Why d o y u n e e d
m y I D? W h e r e h a v
t h e y h i d d e n the wires?
I’m fucctional 4ward even eff movement is a matter
of concession 2 treatment: hot dog water Panko facts
We are legally obligated 2 gift all generic medicines
My most mother-in-law-ly wishes
rainbows in 1 gulp They beat the gnats The bsides:
hide-a-key coke copping in [this literally
happened] a crab shack bathroom
A McDonald’s bathroom
But i don’t do crab coke or McDonald’s nymore
or cataracts
of sorrow or the way sumtimes w no warning
wind would pull from me
my ten thousand hundred pipings
Unstopped Not even eff i do luv
a lil’ death in me
