Despairingly Seeking A Craft and Poetics of Hope

Jubi Arriola-Headley (he/him) is "a Black homoflexible poet, storyteller, first-generation United Statesian," who writes poems that engage in equal measure pleasure, kink, rage, grief, vulnerability, and love.

What I most love about his work is the way he allows nptj pleasure and the politics/vulnerability that surround both the Black and queer experiences. He writes; 

        the exercise of pleasure as
revolution. The incantatory vapors it
raises, they steady us. We breathe, deep,
for all those what couldn’t.

He writes a poem to God, in which he gossips with them, and is still mad at them. 
So…who is
the ‘you’ and the ‘we’ in this fiction? God asks, resting
Their chin in Their hands, drinking me in, the way one sits
with any queerness. (God will slip into vernacular at will.)

Hope to me comes through in allowing all experiences to be here at once. In gossiping with God, in allowing pleasure and despair to be tainted with one another. You can read more of Jubi's poems here, and buy your copy of Bound here. 

Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) speculative fiction writer and poet from Nova Scotia.

Her book Green Fuse Burning is a swampcore eco-horror novel about an artist who is grieving climate change and loss, and encounters something in the swamp: Lichen Woman, who is part monster, part swamp, all nature. What I love most is that through grieving what is vulnerable, Morris gives us something SO EXTRA, it can't be killed.

Check out this description of Lichen Woman, one of my favorite in all writing last year:

Rita pushed herself backward through mud and reeds, away from the woman of her vision, instinct taking over in responding as if her fire were real. The woman’s form was revealed with new clarity as sunlight broke in a halo behind her head. Dripping sap and mycelium held the cursed being together in orange layers of rotted frill, a woman and not-woman wrapped in the skin of the swamp. The sweet and sour too-wet stench of decay emanated from the creature, conjuring in Rita a mix of revulsion and hunger. Pulsating pustules lined the woman’s torso, as brilliant as shining jewels as they burst from beneath folds of lichen. Rita’s head swam at the overpowering presence of her, the dangerous beauty of this otherworldly entity. The woman was the triumph of life over death, the maggot rot of decomposition cycled into new existence. She was victory over her father’s last struggling breath. The rabbit. The fox. The bludgeoned roadkill blazing on hot summer roadsides. A mouse’s dripping twitch in a stray cat’s mouth. The woman’s existence was like all those dead things had crawled out from death’s hidden corners, eyes gleaming as they breathed once again.

Tiffany Morris takes climate change sadness and transforms it. The too-muchness, the hyperabundance, the loving indulgence of what can’t be killed. I never knew how much hope and joy could be found in the monstrous. But why not create a monster, or engage in the swamps? 

My friend, the writer and artist Nancy Au, said to me once there is always a poem.

Not that you should always write a poem, but there is always a poem. She said, if all else fails: “What is the view from the bathroom floor?”

From the metaphorical bathroom floor, after whatever got me there, crying, sick, despairing, I see cool white tiles, a window with a tiny slice of blue, or stars, and sometimes the moon. I can see an illuminated place between the stars where we could all go beyond this moment. If I’m very lucky, I can help bring it closer, at least to me. At least long enough to get myself to a place where I can go out and protest, or call my representatives, or keep on writing/dancing/loving being human, or vote. 

(not my window, BTW)
What are your favorite hopeful texts of the last year? Where are you finding hope, in writing, art, and life? Will you let me know?