Reviews

Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing by Nathaniel Mackey

codi_codi's review against another edition

5.0

One of the more important books I've read in my life. I will be buried with this one.

ralowe's review against another edition

5.0

very much like poet theorist fred moten, nathaniel mackey provides the discursive and aesthetic resources for a black (queer) resistance. "queer" in parenthesis? no, out of parenthesis: black queer resistance. this is perhaps the best opportunity to admit with what great fondness i so long to inhabit the discrepancy. or is it a longing that is already from within. i'm leaning on blackness here as the study of a disformed canon in the style of judy and spillers because yes there are white folks in the mix. but our focus is clearly on the problematic operation that blackness socially fulfills, the social discrepancy in relation. my reading list just burst and with poetry, which i didn't expect. i've had *paracritical hinge* on my shelf like forever and i'm not sure what brought me to this first. but it's a must-have because of its overjoyous atlas affect. i'm like super into all the things that mackey brings out in the poets here. omg robert duncan. realized that this was one of the poets in a class that a friend of mine had taught at state. and that he was gay and wrote about it a decade before the mattachines. struggling with essence and the land, and what was extracted from it in the analogy of the beat. i hate the beats but i find that i'm deeply motivated to learn more about the prototypes behind their discrepant intervention. this book made me look up amiri baraka's "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS," and moten's *in the break* felt all tied together through that work (for me) after listening and sitting with that piece. i love the works in this book: olson, braithwaite, wilson harris. my mind is shooting in a thousand directions. i didn't realize orlando patterson was a novelist, too! i love creeley's stumbling prose! whatever this doing of derrida without derrida is i'm super feeling it, the absence central to musical presence as mackey works through and thinks with myth from papua new guinea of a sibling turning into a muni bird to create music in shattered kinship. it's perhaps ironic with that thought the extent to which gender remains undertheorized in this discrepant category of black study. spillers holds it down but i want more! i'm still trying to look for any discursive workers associated with "where we at" black women artists collective other than who i've already read. hattie gossett is the find that seems closest to what i think i'm still looking for. but my current prospective reading list's gender imbalance has me desperately wanting more!