Saida Agostini's “let the dead in” Featured in Ms. Magazine
Saida Agostini's debut collection of poems receives a glowing recommendation from Ms. Magazine in three words: "Mythology, ancestry, triumph."
Popular American feminist megazine, Ms. Magazine, shouts out Saida Agostini's much raved about new collection of poems in a listicle posted on April 20th entitled "Poetry for the Rest of Us 2022." With three words, "Mythology, Ancestry, Triumph" Ms. places Agostini's let the dead in among recent poetry standouts like Salmas Sharif's Customs and Aurielle Marie's Gumbo Ya Ya. Ms. Magazine has a long history of supporting female-identifying artists and the editor's whole-hearted support for Agostini's latest is welcome and merited.
Saida Agostini’s first full-length poetry collection, 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.
Read a poem from let the dead in Here, watch her discuss ltdi Here, and order your copy Here
Earth Day Reflections: To See for the First Time
“Our communications are profuse and immediate, as is our consciousness of the interrelationship of all that exists. We’ve seen what we often leave in our wake—homeless populations, spoiled wilderness. We can see the way the decisions and investments that we make, here, everyday, can effect just how much milk a baby in Uganda gets. Our world is a teeming, mysterious, multi-cultural mousetrap of a place where everything seems to hinge on something else. We share a new concept of this planet as a finite space, dense, and more difficult than ever to navigate. We live in an environment fraught with hazard, and it is important to have good guides, guides with insight—those who tread softly.”
Joanna Biggar’s Picks for NPM (Week 3)
Week three of National Poetry Month is here and we are still celebrating! So as the champagne continues relentlessly foaming for party-goers catching their tipsy mid-air, we asked author, Joanna Biggar, to select three poems she thinks are worthy of applause between wassails.
James J. Patterson’s Picks for NPM (week 2)
In honor of National Poetry Month, We asked author and essayist extraordinaire, James J. Patterson, to select three poems he’d like to see celebrated. Along with Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night Alone” (featured above), he chose Wordsworth’s “The World is too much with Us”, And Last but not least, the famed American Poet Robert Bly performing the poem “On Being a Man” by the famed Spanish poet, Antonio Machado.