Long form research
Entangled thematic worlds emerge from this research: speculation and erasure in archival marginalia, sport and leisure among militarized colonial subjects, industrialized sugarcane experiments, labor and land laws, Black and Asian solidarities, novel gender expressions, non-human animal husbandry, medical/biological policing, millenarian rebellions, climate crises and famine, caste-race-gender-class-delineated “Love Laws,” anti-colonial independence movements, and more.
I take my family’s experience and mobility from indenture to land-ownership as colonial subjects in India and Kenya, and later the U.K. and the American South, as one entrypoint into this work.
My inquiries are building toward a book-length collection of essays and another, of speculative verse. You can read sample excerpts in the publications O BOD, rivulet, and in 128 Lit.
Fragments
While I was in residence at Writers House Pittsburgh (2022), an accidental new writing emerged. Taking notes and fragments of writing from 2015–2016 and braiding them together with an ongoing reading practice/study of ice as a trope in Romantic-era poetry and colonial medical travelogues, I began working on a loose project. Its themes are leisure, anti-police protest, years preceding a change in pronouns, love as a practice, trans*oceanic solidarity. In this project, Dr. Frankenstein’s glorious Creature is introduced, as are the theorists Mbembe and Levinas. In this project, tsunami could be the Shelley-esque icefloe, what precedes it, what emerges after a warming of the sea of ethics.
You can read a sampling in the Poetry Project’s Footnotes.
More to come...
Chapbooks, essay, micro-fictions, and photo collections are in the works :)