
Wild Peach by s*an d. henry-smith
Futurepoem
2020
Softcover / 6 x 8 in / 160 pp
ISBN 978-1733038423
$20
"Wild Peach is a multisensory roaming of landscape and interior, often (but not always) in near stillness and varying light. The power to disrupt and obscure language is an essential tool in protecting this multimodal endeavor; in this project, poetry and photography warm the taste of memory, exploring nonlinear, non-narrative time through the sonic offerings of image and textÑand the Outdoors, the interpersonal, and all offered onto. Black Secrecy demands and provides a spirit of collaboration, study, and play. Rest without guilt. Two steppin' in the parking lot. Screaming into the night sky. In the garden and the noise, what must be learned from the garble? We listen. The ocean is always just over your shoulder.
Exploiting the sonic resources of language, particularly in its use of the long vowel, Wild Peach resonates as spell, spilling into enchantment and trance. We witness the natural world as though through an apertures' fecund world of seed and plant, dirt and flowers, worms and milkweed, and the many other small acts and creatures of nature. With the sonic and the visual as its axis, Wild Peach sows a bittersweet garden seeded with anecdotal memory counterpointed by lambent, photographic images by Henry-Smith themself. In this garden words call us to sound them out as if newly hatched into newness; words that need to be loved by the tongue and which ask our mouth to hold and savour them lovingly. Replete with recipes, nourishment and verbal mouthfeel, Wild Peach is embodied poetry for the gut, the soul, the head and the heart that satisfies our senses on many levels. Wild Peach insists on being read. Out loud. On being seen. And, in radical acts of sociality, on being heard.
--M. NourbeSe Philip"