apparitions (nines)

Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha's apparitions (nines) in its "charred golden minidress," ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of "niners," a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

'Describing and defying the murder of experimental gathering requires and allows syntactic variety, paratactic flare. What you can hear in Nat's nonet9 is dressed to kill, extravagant, and spare. For all we've ever wanted, all we've ever needed is a weapon to share. In apparations / this is unconcealed, & open, && laid bare. Seeing that we haven't just been seeing things is rare.' – Fred Moten

'Like a sculptor releasing the figure from the stone, Nat Raha breaks and chips away at language to liberate and unleash the hidden, layered meanings that nest within the anguish that is english. Through the inherent restraint of the niner, apparitions both complicates and clarifies the contesting and lasting forces of empire, allowing us to "re/assemble[d] our/affections and solidarities/our cracked, efflorescent hands.' – m. nourbeSe philip

'Get through the day. There's no night. Repeat. An "excruciate living" manifests itself in lines that fold on the bias of a diagonal mark, dots that conjoin to form a briefly stable square before disintegrating again. In apparitions, syntax is both magnified and contracted, a profoundly moving somatic register. A duplicate semi- colon makes the line shake. This is a book that imagines (and refuses to imagine) survival, in spaces that serrate recollection, that don't require their occupants to be embodied subjects. Nat Raha is a brilliant writer who upholds and generates incompleteness as both ethics and terrain. Book as scream. Book as frequency. Here, in the book, we might "remember what we live." Not how.' – Bhanu Kapil

Read an interview with Raha up on the Nightboat here