the delicacy of embracing spirals

Incendiary, lyrical poems of liberation from the oppression of Black womanhood. "To encounter the words of mimi tempestt on the page, or in performance, is to witness the rare transcendency of language where the line becomes an exacting blade. i dare you not to sleep on any prodigious Black woman’s soliloquy. i dare you to hold these words & find yourself implicated in the violent acts that serve as the backdrop to the blood spilled onto these pages. Read this book. You have no choice. Approach with caution. Defend yourself with claims of nuance and complexities. Do what you must, but know that once unsheathed these words, as Hanzo steel, have a way of cutting through the whiteness to get to the realities of Black and Brown truths."—Truong Tran, author of Book of the Other: Small in ComparisonWedding fierce, even jagged lines to an uncompromisingly lyrical flow honed over years of performance, mimi tempestt writes poems that are by turns cerebral, profane, revolutionary, comedic, erotic, and sentimental, with a visual sense that explodes across the page. the delicacy of embracing spirals is her second book, an investigation of the ways in which the personal narrative of Black womanhood can be expressed through a radically human lens, to expand on the possibilities of selfhood, liberation, and autonomy. Beginning with microcosmic poems of personal struggle and spiraling out into macrocosmic texts of social and political critique, the book culminates in an account of the impossible staging of a play where the lives of the characters and the audience are at stake. The three central questions this collection raises are “What haunts you? What hunts you? Who and what are you hunting?” the delicacy of embracing spirals blends theatre, melodrama, art, and lyricism through fragmented language, mosaic pieces, narrative, histories, and characterizations. It prioritizes the use of an ongoing dialectic to express a consciousness about being Black, being woman, being queer, being radical, being complex, being imperfect, being beautiful, being alive, being oppressed, and most essentially, being complicatedly human. The poems utilize memory and narrative to radically engage with the “performance” of oppression that gets in the way of Black womanhood and prevents Black humanity from being fulfilled. Most importantly, this collection unapologetically holds the white gaze hostage.