• 0 items$0.00

Alan Squire Publishing

A Small Press With Big Ideas

  • Home
  • Authors
  • Books
  • Events
  • ASP Bulletin
  • Reviews/Press
    • Legacy Series
  • Submissions
  • Staff
  • FB
  • Twitter
  • IG
Home / home / Joseph Ross Reviews “let the dead in”

Apr 06 2022

Joseph Ross Reviews “let the dead in”

Ross praises the new Saida Agostini collection in his review titled, "If You Love the Living, Get Saida Agostini’s 'let the dead in'"

Untitled design (11)

Poet and critic, Joseph Ross, tackles the wrinkles and crevasses of Saida Agostini's maverick debut poetry collection, let the dead in. let the dead in, is an exploration of  the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation. Audacious, sensual, and grieving, this work explores how Black women harness the fantastic to craft their own road to freedom. A journey across Guyana, London, and the United States, it is a meditation on black womanhood, queerness, the legacy of colonization, and pleasure. These poems craft a creation story fat with love, queerness, mermaids, and blackness.

An excerpt from Ross' review follows.

Read the full review here

Saida Agostina’s collection, let the dead in, reminds me. It reminds me to remember the richness of living, the beauty of love in places we don’t expect. This beautiful collection of poems is a tap on the shoulder, followed by this advice: “Look everywhere for beauty.”

let the dead in begins with beauty before you open its pages. The cover, a painting by Stephen Towns, a Baltimore painter and fabric artist, provides a visual feast for this gathering of poems. Towns’ painting, titled “All Is Vanity,” shows us a Black woman standing in what might be a cane field, beneath a canopy of cards, bearing images of people. The woman, halo-clad, indicating her own holiness, stares directly at the viewer/reader. This is just what Agostini’s poems will do in the pages to come. She stares right at us, asking, daring, insisting that we see people and places: Black women, people who have suffered erasure, her mother, her granny, her great granny, Guyana, people whose bodies and loves are often ignored or despised. The book unfolds into three sections, which the people at Alan Squire Press, including co-founder Rose Solari, have formatted beautifully, with space and simplicity.

Read the full review Order let the dead in

Submitting to Literary Journals: Three Quick Tips for Beginners

August 4, 2023

Writing can be a labor of love. Finishing a piece that you’re proud of feels like a Herculean accomplishment at times. Taking the next step and starting a whole new […]

A Celebration of Prose: James J. Patterson and Aaron Hamburger Read at The Writer’s Center

July 7, 2023

On June 16th, following the release of Junk Shop Window: Essays on Myth, Life, and Literature, James J. Patterson gave a reading at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland—“the center […]

The cover of Junk Shop Window

James J. Patterson’s Junk Shop Window on E. Ethelbert Miller’s On the Margin

June 1, 2023

By Eylie Sasajima To celebrate the upcoming release of Junk Shop Window: Essays on Myth, Life, and Literature, on June 6, ASP’s James J. Patterson was interviewed on E. Ethelbert […]

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 120
  • Next »

Written by Alan Squire Publishing · Categorized: home

© Copyright 2023 Alan Squire Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Website by Sara Chandlee. Graphic design by Dewitt Designs