RockSaltStone

by Rosamond S. King

Overview

Rock|Salt|Stone sprays life-preserving salt through the hard realities of rocks, stones, and rockstones used as anchors, game pieces, or weapons. The manuscript travels through Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA, including cultures and varieties of English from all of those places. The poems center the experience of the outsider, whether she is an immigrant, a woman, or queer. Sometimes direct, sometimes abstract, these poems engage different structures, forms, and experiences while addressing the sharp realities of family, sexuality, and immigration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937658618
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

ROSAMOND S. KING is a creative and critical writer, performer, and artist. She is the author of the critical book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. She is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Table of Contents

ONE
Bring Back
TWO
[I was eating cereal and water]
[the room gets/heavy]
Lajablesse in Oakland
Stranger in the Dark
[Roll the curlers under.]
[I cut off my feet]
[need grows]
[scrub dark and soiled areas.]
for Isatou for Haddy for Adama for Elle
[In the day/you strut]
Tambourine bottle another day
REPARATIONS
THREE
[I cannot hula hoop anymore]
[The family sound dry]
In search of a word
[There is no more reason]
[each clump of grass or stone holds heat]
first fever
[The punctuation in between]
Testing the Glass
[you woke up yesterday and did not expect to die]
FOUR
“She”
Spit in a well
[sex can, on occasion]
[The slices of keratin that are her nails.]
[I fell in love with the market woman]
the pavement/road/stone glistens
Black girls taste like you. nasty.
[I love myself/when]
Darling youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu zami
Experiments in Spellchick we are all language poets
FIVE
the poem wet the poem s t r e t c h e d out the poem with overgrowth the poem mud the poem lyric reaching the poem blinged out silent
SIX
[There are some caterpillars]
Sea Garden
[There is no heat in the hot.]
[I appreciate your work]
[Because evil]
(Name withheld)
[Go home, water poet]
[memory is not true]
SEVEN
Old Head.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Notes and Additional Reading
Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

M. NourbSe Philip

“Nation language, language poetry, prose poems, spells, Caribbean nancy stories, queer issues, Rock|Salt|Stone, African (Yoruba) belief systems and ancestral memory all find a place in Rosamond S. King’s multiplicity of forms. The embodied quality of the poems and King’s willingness to confront the inherent difficulty of relationship with the Other, who is always us, grounds the work in a somatic poetics that demands the reader pay attention. ”

Ebony Noelle Golden

“King’s persona is one who brings healing through truth-telling, blood-letting, and unearthing as she traverses time and space.”

Douglas Kearney

“... are you creating demons/or maybe just writing poems?" When the poem is a spell, the poet does both: conjuring. In the startling Rock | Salt | Stone, Rosamond S. King calls demons of sudden, though long due violence; of folklore mashed up down the hold to be “mashed up” with what awaits on new shores; of perverse yearnings to pike transgressive sexuality on a cis-man’s index. King works hard magic in the smoke of this infernal manufactory, nose open for at least two kinds of salt, ears open to crack double-jointed syntax, eyes open to those who swear destroying her is divine. She sees them traveling their straight line—this bravura book of curses means to curve them.”

John Keene

“In Rock|Salt|Stone, poet, critic, artist, and activist Rosamond S. King creates and conjures the elemental, in form and language, into a stellar, black, queer womynist force. Traversing continents (Gambia, Trinidad and Tobago, the US), and a variety of idioms, King’s poems cast sparks, strike lightning. Showing how poetry can shift codes and embody experience, whether that of women coming out to their family and loving each other without fear, whether calling upon the deities or living and surviving chronic pain, King playfully sculpts with the tenderness of a razor, and she ain’t playing. Enter into these poems, and surrender to their spell.”

Editorial Reviews

02/20/2017
King (Island Bodies), an accomplished scholar and performer, opens her formally daring verse debut with a version of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” recasting it to address Afro-Caribbean diasporas, and starring Yoruba deities Eshu, Oshun, and Ogun. “My brawn it belongs to the Ogun/ my blood it flows into the sea/ the two meet inside a black body/ and whisper you fight to be free,” runs one of several verses before the newly meaningful call to “Bring/ Back.” It is representative of several defining elements of the book, among them a deep engagement with history and mythology, a sense of play, and formal techniques that require the reader to hear—not just read—the poem. King teases out the tension between poem as print object and performance score, not only through the poems’ music, but also through unconventional uses of the page and typography, extreme lineation (“you/ no/ me/ no/ us/ yes/ we/ then/ who”), as well as through onomatopoeia, misspellings (“Her genus lies in the fat that her writing perfectualy invects the reeder in”), and the incorporation of other languages, including Wolof and several Caribbean vernaculars. King uses English while writing beyond and against the bounds of its conventions, and also to foreground the speaking, hearing body—and importantly, the black, queer, female body—as the site where language originates and lands. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Because bodies are not rocks but get weighed down by them when tossed into the ocean to drown. Because bodies are not consumed by mouths but are covered in salty sweat and can be beaten like meat. Because bodies have mouths but can not always speak without being stoned and sometimes the mouths make the wrong shapes and so the bodies become demons then ghosts then demons then ghosts again. Because the bodies wash up on the shore and wash up still. Because all things that are life become death like water or salt or stone or rock or other bodies and when not all the bodies fit together huddled on the rock, and so as some bodies cling to the hard surface with their bruised fingers and open mouths, other bodies shove those bodies off, without blinking, because blinking would be memory, and here, in the unraveling hardness and conjuration of demons, memory is not always honest and words are not always true.”—Janice Lee

“King (Island Bodies), an accomplished scholar and performer, opens her formally daring verse debut with a version of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” recasting it to address Afro-Caribbean diasporas, and starring Yoruba deities Eshu, Oshun, and Ogun. “My brawn it belongs to the Ogun/ my blood it flows into the sea/ the two meet inside a black body/ and whisper you fight to be free,” runs one of several verses before the newly meaningful call to “Bring/ Back.” It is representative of several defining elements of the book, among them a deep engagement with history and mythology, a sense of play, and formal techniques that require the reader to hear—not just read—the poem...King uses English while writing beyond and against the bounds of its conventions, and also to foreground the speaking, hearing body—and importantly, the black, queer, female body—as the site where language originates and lands.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher