To Be Hung from the Ceiling By Strings of Varying Length (Black Goat)

Young poet Rick Reid enters the pantheon of Chris Abani’s Black Goat poetry series.

“Rick Reid is one the most startling, exciting, and innovative poets now writing. He is doing nothing less than reimagining and redefining the boundaries of our poetry. The future of poetry starts here.” ―David St. John, author of Prism

This groundbreaking poetry collection is a work of interval, delay, and retracing―writing of shifts of silence. Each page serves as a kind of frame that superimposes itself temporally, aurally, and visually on the pages that come before and after to produce a process of both afterimage and surfacing. Inspired by the process of painting and over-painting a canvas―the perceptual and image-layering found in processes of superimposition―to be hung from the ceiling by strings of varying length explores both the creation and decay of memory and perception through phases of sound and space, whereby seeing and writing generate and erase themselves simultaneously.

Rick Reid is a conceptual artist and writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York where he is developing a number of works that combine public space, poetics, handwriting, photography, paint, and the body. Chris Abani, curator of Akashic's Black Goat poetry imprint, is a Nigerian poet and novelist and the author of Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, and GraceLand (a selection of the Today Show Book Club; winner of the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award).