Poetry. African & African American Studies. Newcomer and Sawtooth Poetry Prize winner Jonah Mixon-Webster urgently considers the poetics of space and body, of race and region, of sexuality and class in the present day-- the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; systemic racism--within the architecture of the current collective crisis and imagination. To take up space in an experimental way, through lyric, sound and conceptual art, this collection activates the contentious trope of "The Real Nigga" as zombie (embodiment of the thing already dead), linguistic substrata (the basis and site of identity through language formation and synthesis), and as precursor for colonizing archetypes (in the Jungian sense--an unconscious, collectively inherited idea that develops into socially constructed and consciously typified symbols of human identity and function). He challenges current stereotypes through the character's experience and through mythology; "Now this nigga Niggaphus was the darkest 'mortal' anybody had ever seen in Greece."
