Nightboat Books, 2019
In their debut collection, Hull Xandria Phillips writes: “I am a poet and a queer and I cannot real-estate a bit more of my tongue to doctors or men. And with this heavy mouth, I spouted these words in whale song. Inaudible. Why don’t you spit those out, she said, so I can hear the yes that’s under all that need?” These are poems of longing and dissection. Lines spread out across the page like a body, like many bodies, like breath or, perhaps, “a salient stain on the horizon that never makes port.” There’s a variation of forms obliterating expectations of racial and gender norms. This collection swells an ocean’s belly, its histories and diaphanous singing made deadly tactile. These poems are “shrines to the tactile.”
––Jeric Smith
