VERSO / volume 7 — January editorial
VERSO / vol. 7 is a new form of sharing art and culture. Each month we’ll curate contributions of writing, poetry and visual art packaged along with personalized editorials and deliver them monthly.
We’re happy to share editorials and photos of already shipped packages with you here.
Hi friends,
Welcome to the first edition of analog VERSO / volume 7! I hope this letter finds you giggling or engaged with something juicy or dancing wild and blissful to a particularly vibey bop.
Last summer busted me wide open. My homegirl perfectly articulated how exposed I had been feeling when she said it felt like our trauma was trending, our deepest wounds made into hashtags. That yes our experiences were finally being centered, but didn’t it also feel like being flattened?
To make it through 2020 I needed something that centered our wholeness, that took seriously our wildest fantasies, unarticulated hopes and deepest longings. Did you also feel the need to cling to something other than the pain? By training our eyes on the spectacle alone weren’t we feasting on our own ashes?
Christina Sharpe’s book “On Blackness and Being” helped. In it the author builds a poetic framework for understanding anti-Blackness and the gratuitous death that pervades Black lives in the afterlife of slavery. The book is devastating and illuminating. Sharpe introduces the idea of “woke work” and the practice of redaction and annotation as tools to facilitate new ways of seeing and reading Black life.
Mz.Icar
I had been haunted by the ghosts of Black girl poems and novels adrift in laptops and drawings in sketchbooks reduced and crushed into the small spaces allowed for our big brilliance. I wanted more for us. A redaction of the pain, an annotation to animate these ghosts. This became my resistance.
When I look at Mz.Icar’s collage “Under it all”, I am reminded of all that we carry. How all that burdens is also what adorns. I’m reminded of organizers and health care workers and cleaners and mothers. I’m reminded of Zora Neale Hurston calling us “the mules of the Earth”. Which reminds me of the alchemy formed deep in the Earth’s core over billions of years, under extraordinary heat and pressure. Carbon atoms bonding and hardening producing jewels that shine regardless.
Megan Fernandes
We enter 2021 already knowing the answer to the question of Megan Fernandes’s zine. “R U Blue” reads like the voice we all hope to find at the other end of the hotline. Like if you wrote simply “I’m sad, help” in a pre-digital time, this zine is what your penpal might desperately cut and paste together, spray some perfume on, and kiss with corner store lipgloss just before popping in the mailbox. It’s that tender, that urgent. That much of a balm.
Analog VERSO / is a gathering. So much is possible when we gather. When we circle round ourselves and each other. When we hold us at the center of our gaze. When that gaze is loving, amplifies, gives breath, is the wind at our backs. It's in the gathering that we find each other, always each other, it’s in the holding that we're made whole.
May this parcel be an intervention, a redaction of all things that feel like an assault to your senses right now. A shifting of your gaze, a centering, an annotation. Look, here. Here there is tenderness, here it is safe. VERSO / volume 7 is a witnessing.
May you feel seen.