SWOLE

Author: Jerika Marchan Publisher: Futurepoem (2018) "SWOLE full y'all––of what flotsam language is when time comes to name the wrongs befalling (some of) us. A songbook of catastrophes—these, big as bodies, small as cities––Marchan's reeling debut is the real thing. She washed her lines in Katrina's filthy water till they smeared into gendercrit mondegreens, broad dialects, Yung Crank's crunk-ass barz, and syntax that's at once saturated and eroded. Reckoning the wreckage, she writes: 'after the rain has left my room coldish / … I light / candles makes me feel / oceanic or just salty'—vast and pissed, deep and caustic, SWOLE near bursts with poetry." –Douglas Kearney "Against the impulse to 'draw lines as a kind of forgetting,' Jerika Marchan's SWOLE comes 'a-knockin' just in the nick of time. In the tradition that includes the work of C.D. Wright, Myung Mi Kim and NourbeSe Philip, this is a book we've been waiting for: the one in which the catastrophe is on-going, beginning again and