Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking

"Looking And Seeing is a poetic work of equal parts yearning, regret and righteous indignation. On these pages, what is said and what is written renders us seen in all our complications. I wrote this book as a singular and lifelong investigation of my being and my body as someone brown moving through white spaces. That it now finds itself bound together in a single volume and in proximity to the work of my friend Damon Potter, that he is a white man and I am a brown man, and that I am writing this into existence, means the world to me. Seeing and Looking is a recording taken in proximity to my friend Truong Tran. In this book, I examine who I am and who I want to be, the complications and realities of trying to be good while also benefitting from our oppressive past and present. I am oppressor. And also my friends die. Someday I'll die. I witness horrible acts. I witness the moon. I remember awful grains I've committed myself. In Seeing and Looking, I wonder how to be respectfully dying while everyone else is also dying. In Seeing and Looking, I witness my self"--