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In their hybrid debut collection Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates stunning textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document.
Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In their hybrid volume Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amid grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss. A revelatory debut volume, Arrangements collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, Raja Lubinetzki, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Octavia Rucker Gabrielle.
— Fred Moten
"Ar:range:ments is miraculous in its ability to attend to silence and absence in such a way as to invite, at every juncture, a form of visitation. Esther Kondo Heller’s deep lyrical listening and rapt seeking prove that grief is love that persists across all manner of distance. In these poems, grief becomes a gathering ground."
"Memory is the poem we live, not the poem we choose. Here, Esther Kondo Heller has offered a lost and found—a catalog of wondering—in which we can find the edges of our own losses and our own reach for language. Spend time here. Know that the space here is space for you, wide with the absences you hold."
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs
"In Arrangements by Esther Kondo Heller, words in their reminders and remainders transmute: in mutter is contained the mother, the mumble, the muted, the utterance; and in any image crossed with text there is the potential of performance. This is poetry that does not describe but acts, lives, and knows. Perfectly arranged, this collection powers and glides."
"Ar:range:ments—a recognizable English word ever so slightly deranged by punctuation, challenging the eye but neatly parsing syllables for the ear—is the title of Esther Kondo Heller’s first book. It’s also an apt label for the visuoverbal works they create: page-ranging ar:range:ments of image and text, quotation and collage, English and German and Swahili and the stray graphemes that flake off of them."