ANYTHING WITH SPIRIT
by isaiah h. hines
Emerging luminary isaiah a. hines approaches Black queer life from ontological and structural perspectives alchemically synthesized with a scalding, confessional honesty. Roof Books is proud to publish Anything with Spirit, which personalizes the poet’s existential probing. Writing toward a poetry of the whole consciousness, hines explores the states of duality and contradiction that form their sense of identity and experience, which they refer to as “afropolarity,” a form of negative capability observed by survivors of hegemonic, racialized violence. Their focus shift continuously from personal memories of traumatic childhood prejudice to complex rhetorical calculations about communication and self-purpose.
Praise for Anything with Spirit:
A spectral incantation of zeroes, Anything with Spirit (re)possesses isaiah hines’s polar musings into a sacred, kinetic embroidering of language, spirit, and questions over (re)corded subjection. This work is a feedback loop of linguistic revolt, countering the plantation plots of blackness to re(world) and unearth a new syntax of resistance. Hines summons us into the mixed-unresolved —where desperate notations of being are neither static nor singular coded but verbs perpetually in motion. Through patterns of the unrelated, hines hijacks separations, revealing equations where existence and fallen language coalesce, a queer testament to the entanglement of meaning, spirit, and rebellion (re)belling.
- Sol Cabrini
Thank God and Spirit for people like hines with a drive for healing and self-knowledge and the formal and critical fearlessness that altogether accomplish a poetry that surpasses the gluttonous demands of the assimilationist, closemouthed present. hines’s multidimensional poems are in reality in a league of their own prestige, their charged-up power possible through the brilliant attention to race as a fundamental materiality of all language, plus the understanding that within poetic experimentation cultural change is essentially sedimented. I love this book and receive its inspired, darker clarities.
- Kenneth Reveiz
About the Author:
isaiah a. hines is a poet and scholar from Burlington, Vermont. Their debut collection, null landing, won the 2020 Slope Editions Book Prize and was a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation 2023 Legacy Award in Poetry. Their writing can be found in FLAT Journal (UCLA) and is forthcoming in Obsidian: Arts & Literature of the African Diaspora and Root Work Journal. They studied film and ethnic studies at Columbia University and Brooklyn College, before moving to Troy to pursue a doctoral degree in communication and rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.