Firespitter
Publication Information
New York : Nightboat Books, [2025]
Physical Description
xxxii, 645 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Summary
"Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice,Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez's practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed.In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, 'her poetry was never 'protest' but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.'"--
Contents
- Firespitter : foreword / Sapphire
- Introduction / Margaret Busby
- Pissstained stairs and the monkey man's wares (1969)
- Festivals and funerals (1971)
- Scarifications (1973)
- Mouth on paper (1977)
- Firespitter (1982)
- Coagulations: new and selected poems (1984)
- Poetic magnetic : poems from Everywhere drums & Maintain control (1991)
- Fragments (1994) : sculpture and drawings from the "Lynch fragment" series by Melvin Edwards with poetry of Jayne Cortez
- Somewhere in advance of nowhere (1996)
- Jazz fan looks back (2002)
- The beautiful book (2007)
- On the Imperial Highway : new and selected poems (2009)
- Iron rattles & paper money in the future of the past (2012)
- Fishing in the history (2012).