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Jubi Arriola-Headley
Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes acclaimed poet JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY for a discussion of his debut poetry collection, original kink. He will be joined in conversation with ALLISON ADAIR, creative writing professor at Boston College and author of the award-winning poetry collection The Clearing.
In original kink, Jubi Arriola-Headley explores kink as mythscape of promised pleasure, lush and lustral, kink as Godzilla's desire for softness and the speaker gone "starburst," kink as "the sun-soaked / surface of impossible kick" and "something loose enough / to dance in."
At once soliloquy, praise song, and injunction, original kink divines the brutal offices and beauteous comforts of syntax, street corners, and superheroes as sites for Black and queer (un)becomings. Accompanied by Eve, Isaac Newton, and a cotillion of daddies, Arriola-Headley writes into pleasure's beyond, questioning "What it must be / to presume life / to presume tomorrow." These poems "glutton at spring's source, / ever lovedrunk on / the insistent gush of you," and create a dazzling, multiple "We." These poems enjoin the reader—and themselves—to "Be better / than bitter. Be roiling in joy. Be."
