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.
Price: $13.00
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Imprint: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date:
11 March 2025
ISBN: 9781964499413
Format: eBook
BISACs:
POETRY / General, POETRY / LGBT, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global), POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss
If in the space between mutter and Mutter a dying language is born, what is borne there – in the constant opening of carrying over, in the resonant silence of a mother and child reunion – is the sound space/practice room of Pan-African speech, which animates the gift from Esther Kondo Heller that you hold now in your hands. Held now in the violent conservatory that you hold, new tongues in your mouth, new flavors in your ear, are you in disarray? Yeah! It’s her loving (re)arrangement of the collective head.
Esther Kondo Heller is a poet, literary critic, and experimental filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, an Obsidian Foundation fellow, and a Ledbury Critic. They have an M.F.A. in Poetry from Cornell University 23' and are currently, a first-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where they are working on transnational Black poetics and translating the poetry of Black German poet Raja Lubinetzki.
