FEELING OUR POSSIBLE VOLUMES: Jenni(f)fer Tamayo interviews Kay Ulanday Barrett

Jenni(f)fer Tamayo talks with poet, performer, and activist Kay Ulanday Barrett about definitions of work/labor in Sick and Disabled Queer People of Color experiences, how different levels of systemic violence impact one’s poetics, writing as embodied spiritual practice and activism, the ethics of performance, and how expansive definitions of care can be a source of resistance in Kay’s new poetry collection, When the Chant Comes (Topside Press)  

On Jordan Rice’s Constellarium and the Transition Poem

  “Say with me, controlled burn,” Jordan Rice writes midway through her debut collection of poetry, Constellarium (Orison Books, 2016). She’s writing about the Columbia Space Shuttle explosion, but the line also serves as a synecdoche for Rice’s writing: tight, evocative lines, burning just below the surface. Rice weaves together complicated themes, but most of the works in the collection circle around the idea of home, locally and globally, the body, and its changes. They’re poems that are about displacement, quarrel, and loss, and finding transness through that. In its control, hers is a book I’ve been waiting on for some time.