disgust
Published by Nomadic Press
Available via Nightboat Books
Perfect Bound, 130 pages, 5.5” x 7.5”
Publication Date: 23 Oct 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955239-06-6
Foreword by Brontez Purnell
Designed by Jevohn Tyler Newsome
Cover Illustration by Emji Saint Spero
Edited by Michaela Mullin and J.K. Fowler
It’s a poetics of abjection. It’s a new star in the constellation of books by writers who steer language through the body and its complicated relationships with desire…A book about now. I’m freaked out and fascinated.
disgust is an epic, fragmented poem born of a week-long performance, a series of escalating constraints that send Emji Saint Spero spiraling into a frenzy and ultimately, a manic break. In this hesitant and hyper-confessional excavation of the quotidian, Saint Spero constructs a manual for maneuvering as a body under duress.
Debased, abject, and perfectly problematic, it asks us to dissect the ways in which we are othered and the ways we are complicit in our own objectification. This transcript is an architecture built on lack and inter/dependence. Saint Spero’s language stumbles, stutters, interrupts itself, gets it wrong, doesn’t know what’s being asked of it, is left unfinished, exhausted, and is at its most clairvoyant in its collapse.
From the Foreword
by Brontez Purnell
“Neither a victim statement nor a badge of courage, Saint Spero’s text here seems to serve more as a running archive of time, place, event, and to a certain extent an aftermath—that sliver of simultaneously condensed, and sped up time just before the new synapse is formed. disgust denotes that moment the rubber band of the conscious breaks and an old skin is shed to make way for the new; an old self evaporates and a new, slightly scorched self integrates and re-learns how to walk.”
Praise for disgust
