ANC076: Muse by Kelsey L. Smoot
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i belong to myself these days / hasn't always been that way...
Muse finds Kelsey L. Smoot illustrating the zeitgeist of their current personal, social, and political orientation in poems decidedly southern and melancholic. These discordant freedom songs explore people, places, and events Smoot loves, reveres, and reviles. Conceived as the culmination of their "freshman year" writing season, Muse is the chaotic fraternal twin to the debut collection we was bois together—a timestamp of their work and life in increasingly challenging times.
For every copy sold, Another New Calligraphy will donate $1 to the Weelaunee Coalition, an Atlanta collective focused on the #stopcopcity effort and organizing around Palestine and other human rights issues.
"Kelsey is a master of turning a moment into a movement. After reading this text, I don’t know if being the same is an option. Muse has activated me in places that are ancient, present, and future all at once. Kelsey calls us to imagine ourselves more human, more aware, more intentional and to become those versions of ourselves. Taking us in and out of familiar imagery, Muse invites the reader to reckon with cognitive dissonance and increase our capacity to act courageously. Glory to this work for its radical authenticity and acceptance of things as they are, not as we might wish them to be."
—Kiera "Ashlee Haze" Nelson, Poet & CEO
Philosophy Media Group & Kiera Ashlee Talent Co "In a world where capitalist colonial systems are fighting tooth and nail to keep us disembodied, Kelsey’s poems are a balm, a call to step back into ourselves. Muse is a physical experience, a work that asks us to read not just with our eyes but with our hands, belly, jaw, and scars. At the heart of this chapbook are the questions of kinship and what it means to be in community with one another. As Kelsey speaks truth to power, sharing the lived experience of transness and Blackness, and of witnessing genocide in real time, they are bolstered by friends, cousins, ancestors, and even a hitchhiker. The poems in Muse are crafted with careful sonic intention, and they echo long after the final page. Kelsey finds the words for feelings I didn’t know how to name, and reminds us “how fortunate we are/to have found one another/in all of this unluck.”
–Paula Turcotte, author of the chapbook Permutations
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