Permanent Record

Name: Permanent Record
Brand: Nightboat Books
Price: 39.5 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

By: Naima Yael Tokunow (Editor)

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Paperback | 21 May 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
224 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.8 x 15.2

Paperback

RRP $39.99

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Available: 21st May 2025

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A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices.

Inspired by Naima Yael Tokunow’s research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), Permanent Record asks, what do we gain when we engage with our flawed cultural systems of remembrance? How does questioning and creating a deep relationship to the archive, and in some cases, spinning thread from air where there is none, allow us to prefigure the world that we want? Including reflections on identity and language, diasporic and first generation lived experiences, and responses to the ways the record upholds harm and provides incomplete understandings, Permanent Record hopes to reframe what gets to be a part of collective remembrance, exploring “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity.”

Industry Reviews

"The poems in Shadow Black move from startling moments of subtlety to satisfying passages of rant. Naima Tokunow is also a poet of the body, and in that tradition she calls for the liberation of the black body in particular: 'It refuses. It declines. It makes its own.' I'm so glad to have these poems in my life." -Jericho Brown, Guggenheim Fellow & author of The Tradition

"Shadow Black eludes and surprises, a palimpsest against which Naima Yael Tokunow projects the difficult ontology of a lyric identity destabilized by paradigmatic forces meant to corral queerness and femaleness and the facets of a bi-racial identity. Tokunow is a limber lyric poem with a diamond-hard edge that will '...find the way to make teeth/and to open [her] mouth for them...'" -Carmen Gimenez Smith, Co-Director of Cantomundo & author of Be Recorder

"Shadow Black's poems are tightly wound, angled with energy against their specific and deliberate forms, often prosaic, often menacing and eager for the soft mouth of a reader. Riding on the tension between academic, prophetic, elegiac and manifesto voices, Tokunow employs language that seeks moments of penetration and surprise. To experience this collection is to experience the myriad responses, violent and hopeful, to the projection hugging so much skin in America: Shadow Black." -Josh Roark, Editor of Frontier Poetry

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