Poet Roger Reeves calls the essays in his debut book of prose “fugitive essays.” And we explore what it means to write fugitively, to write into and from and toward fugitivity. If, as Fred Moten says, fugitivity is “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. . . . a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument,” how does writing fugitively effect a writer’s orientation to self and selfhood, to one’s own community and people, to nation and nationhood, to the canon and canon formation, to otherness and the stranger, to life and living in the ever-unfolding apocalypse? We look together at what a poet writing essays tells us both about the essay form and about Roger’s poetry and poetics. Deep dives into questions of time, progress, repetition, metaphor, history, ancestry, futurity, presence, sound, and silence.

For the bonus audio archive, Roger contributes an extended reading from Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa. This joins an ever-growing archive of supplemental audio from everyone from Natalie Diaz to Dionne Brand, Isabella Hammad to Christina Sharpe. You can find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page.

The Bookshop for today’s episode contains many of the books mentioned, referenced, or read from.

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