Rimming the Event Horizon by Sabeen Chaudhry
Rimming the Event Horizon gyrates a mutinous poetics of revenge, purposing contingency as a major mechanism of racialisation but also as a source of resistance and refusal, of material and imaginative possibility. It is not really a punitive poetics but rather, 'a constant, experimental exercise of antagonism,' a brutally disruptive 'xenogenerosity' (Harney & Moten). This is a collection of many rotations, revolutions and revolts, from the lick of the cyclone to the whirl of a dervish; the flick of a dragon's tail to the ultra-slow swirl of galaxies or precarious life circling the drain.
Traversing metastable topologies of gender and race as complicitly mattered but also 'out of control,' Rimming the Event Horizon intra-venes in a universe(s) that must simultaneously avenge, and take revenge on itself. Looping the line between life and death, it dangles us over the edge headfirst, tongues out... "Sabeen Chaudhry's Rimming the Event Horizon is an index of "oracular horrors," both "asymptomatic" and "vicious animal".
This is a work of devastation in the present but also "one of many aftermaths." Chaudhry invites a reading of the poem as "bruised verticality." A livid ghost shares space with wrecked daughters at the rim of a well. Is this the portal? "LICK CYCLONE" is the instruction. In this way, a reader's opacity weakens.
There's nowhere not to look." -- Bhanu Kapil
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