Anastacia-Reneé: Forget It

Forget It by Anastacia-Reneé (Black Radish Books, paperback)

Publication Date: July 31, 2017

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Anastacia Reneé's FORGET IT draws the reader into the churning seas of dissolution — marriage, family, identity, livelihood — in language unknotted from the constraints of punctuation, syntax, sense— "eaten into seedless cherries"—and plunged into the fabular scape/scope of dreams, myth, fairytales, faith, race. Phantom births, ghosts, half-grown children, sex, betrayal, violence, anger, female body, the bloody aftermaths of dissolution sprawling, placental and umbilical, in the urgent, haunted language of dreaming and memory. City and speaker dissolve into one another, boundaries vanquished. What remains after dissolution? Talking to herself. From whence do (k)new form(s) arise? A "revelatory hymn", matrix upon which self and sense are (re-)configured as her own, Anastacia Reneé's FORGET IT dances on the grave of the lost—fiery tempest, a phoenix of language and presence. When we wake up, nothing is forgotten.

"This book feels like an entirely new invention. I don't even want to call it a book. I want to call it a thick-paint impressionist new word-reality, a documentation of whatever blush invented the first word. '...you picture yourself as a child seeing the color green for the first time.' Anastacia Reneé does just that, reinvents her reader as this child. This book is, to me, the color green for the first time. About this book, I feel something like what I imagine onlookers must have felt when they first witnessed the Wright brothers thrust air under wing to leave the ground."—Tara Hardy