Praise for Entryways into memories that might assemble me,
*Under "Which issue?" Please enter "Freda Epum Chapbook."
Entryways into memories that might assemble me, is an unsettling, revealing, and fiercely intelligent essay that discovers and names the often troubling ways race and class inform what it means to belong — in a profession, in a conversation, in a country that does not love black women nearly as well as it should. I was riveted by this bold new voice. -- Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings
An astute observer of pop culture, race relations, and all the tricky places in between, Freda Epum has crafted here an exquisite book at the borders of nonfiction and poetry. Call these chapters journal entries. Call them philosophical treaties. Call them DMs or notes from a black girl loving in the storm. Every page came to me like prayers I wanted to recite. -- Daisy Hernández, The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease and COLONIZE THIS! YOUNG WOMEN OF COLOR ON TODAY'S FEMINISM
Epum’s prose is at once casual and infinite. She moves with her reader through trauma, through the specter of Kanye West’s face, through double consciousness, through blue-black, through her mother’s inflection. I felt like I was spending an afternoon with a long lost friend at the museum. What fantastic company. -- Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Borealis and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
Freda Epum’s Entryways into memories might assemble me, appoints a voice with a compelling heroicism of consciousness. Each poem hails seamlessly with decolonial texts to Spongebob to Nina Simone, all with a dexterity of daydreams and episodic possibility. This chapbook is beyond niceties within the first pages, “The class was called Race and Love, and I thought how ironic, for I was raced without love,” Epum writes. Anticipate prose blocks and freeform tact which challenges how we think of mental health, Black and African perspectives, and gender, in a society rife with supremacy. We learn Epum’s vernacular and just how extensive thoughts tangle and touch. This debut chapbook elaborates, examines, questions in a way only this fleshy ineffable hybrid writing can raise. -- poet & cultural strategist, Kay Ulanday Barrett, author of collections When The Chant Comes and More Than Organs
Freda Epum has written a brilliant book, in “Entryways into memories that might assemble me.” I am simply stunned by the poems, their wit and irony, their breadth of emotion and of concerns. I am immersed in the razor-sharp language juxtaposing such topics as family wisdom and W.E.B. Du Bois, pop culture, the act of making art and mental illness. She paints with startling commentary and description, yet notes that “oil on paper degrades itself over time.” The push and pull of the artist’s life, the need to remember the dead while bringing something to life, until her “studio becomes a morgue or a funeral or an emergency room.” Her poetry illuminates the politics of performance and racism, as well as fatigue and hope: “I imagine a wrestling match…in one corner, sorrow in the other, my broken cranial orbit.” I’m thrilled that readers will be able to hold this gem in their hands and read and reread Epum’s fierce love of life. -- Devi S. Laskar, poet and novelist. Author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues
An astute observer of pop culture, race relations, and all the tricky places in between, Freda Epum has crafted here an exquisite book at the borders of nonfiction and poetry. Call these chapters journal entries. Call them philosophical treaties. Call them DMs or notes from a black girl loving in the storm. Every page came to me like prayers I wanted to recite. -- Daisy Hernández, The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease and COLONIZE THIS! YOUNG WOMEN OF COLOR ON TODAY'S FEMINISM
Epum’s prose is at once casual and infinite. She moves with her reader through trauma, through the specter of Kanye West’s face, through double consciousness, through blue-black, through her mother’s inflection. I felt like I was spending an afternoon with a long lost friend at the museum. What fantastic company. -- Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Borealis and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
Freda Epum’s Entryways into memories might assemble me, appoints a voice with a compelling heroicism of consciousness. Each poem hails seamlessly with decolonial texts to Spongebob to Nina Simone, all with a dexterity of daydreams and episodic possibility. This chapbook is beyond niceties within the first pages, “The class was called Race and Love, and I thought how ironic, for I was raced without love,” Epum writes. Anticipate prose blocks and freeform tact which challenges how we think of mental health, Black and African perspectives, and gender, in a society rife with supremacy. We learn Epum’s vernacular and just how extensive thoughts tangle and touch. This debut chapbook elaborates, examines, questions in a way only this fleshy ineffable hybrid writing can raise. -- poet & cultural strategist, Kay Ulanday Barrett, author of collections When The Chant Comes and More Than Organs
Freda Epum has written a brilliant book, in “Entryways into memories that might assemble me.” I am simply stunned by the poems, their wit and irony, their breadth of emotion and of concerns. I am immersed in the razor-sharp language juxtaposing such topics as family wisdom and W.E.B. Du Bois, pop culture, the act of making art and mental illness. She paints with startling commentary and description, yet notes that “oil on paper degrades itself over time.” The push and pull of the artist’s life, the need to remember the dead while bringing something to life, until her “studio becomes a morgue or a funeral or an emergency room.” Her poetry illuminates the politics of performance and racism, as well as fatigue and hope: “I imagine a wrestling match…in one corner, sorrow in the other, my broken cranial orbit.” I’m thrilled that readers will be able to hold this gem in their hands and read and reread Epum’s fierce love of life. -- Devi S. Laskar, poet and novelist. Author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues