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Full-Metal Indigiqueer: the Pro(1,0)zoa
Full-Metal Indigiqueer: the Pro(1,0)zoa | Joshua Whitehead
4 posts | 5 read | 2 to read
This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (? la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular worksin order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. They dazzlingly and fiercely take on the likes of Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Milton while also not forgetting contemporary pop culture figures such as Lana Del Rey, Grindr, and Peter Pan. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time - they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. "Do not read me as a vanished ndn," they ask, "read me as a ghastly one." Full-Metal Indigiqueer is influenced by the works of Jordan Abel, Tanya Tagaq, Daniel Heath Justice, Claudia Rankine, Vivek Shraya, Qwo-Li Driskill, Leanne Simpson, Kent Monkman, and Donna Haraway. It is a project of resurgence for Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and hi/story - the very lives of Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer youth are rarely mentioned (and even dispossessed in our very mandates for reconciliation), our lives are precarious but they too are precious. We find ourselves made spectral in settler and neocolonial Indigenous nationalisms - if reconciliation is a means of "burying the hatchet," Zoa seeks to unearth the bones buried with those hatched scalps and perform a s?ance to ghost dance Indigiqueerness into existence. Zoa world-destroys in order to world-build a new space - they care little for reconciliation but rather aim to reterroritorialize space in literature, pop culture, and oral storytelling. This project follows in the tradition of the aforementioned authors who, Whitehead believes, utilize deconstruction as a means of decolonization. This is a sex-positive project that tirelessly works to create coalition between those who have, as Haraway once noted, "been injured, profoundly." Zoa stands in solidarity with all qpoc folk who exist as ghosts with intergenerational and colonial phantom pains - they sing with Donna Summer, RuPaul, Effie White, and Trixie Mattel. The space made is a post-apocalyptic hub of sex and decolonization - a world where making love is akin to making live.
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Robotswithpersonality
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First, I am in love with this cover, I feel like I find something new in the symbolism every time I look at it.
Strange to read Whitehead's earlier published work after the later books.
Feels like, as a poet, he is exploring/experimenting with styles, personal voice. I'll admit some entries seemed a bit impenetrable, but then I'm beginner-level when it comes to interpreting poetry.
Stand outs for me: Re(z)erving Paradise, Mihkokwaniy
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Robotswithpersonality 2/2 Identified a number of themes that recurr in his books: around bodily autonomy; indigenous rights and traumas (i.e. residential schools, sixties scoop, missing and murdered indigenous women and Two-Spirit people); confronting racism; sex work; queerness; Two-Spirit identity. ⚠️ body image issues, ED, references to mental health(?), suicidal ideation (?), SA 12mo
johncadams This looks very interesting. 12mo
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Robotswithpersonality
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..."but I woke up & lived/ as a poc today"..
...sometimes/ i only want to be heard / & not called a killjoy/
or a naysayer...

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hissingpotatoes
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Bailedbailed

1/5⭐ This type of poetry mostly went over my head. There were def parts I got the message of & appreciated, like Late-Night Reruns & the superbly timed placements of "here i am" & its variations. But those moments are buried in what seemed to me streams of consciousness, which don't work for me, or the bizarre computer-speak formatting that I'm sure a more poetry-oriented person than I am could appreciate the artistry of. #queerlitread #projectnew

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xicanti
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This week's library haul includes poetry, a comic, a short Christmas memoir, and an SF novella.