from “A Mouth Holds Many Things”

Excerpt
Written By Carolina Ebeid and Samiya Bashir

Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, eds. | A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection | Fonograf Editions | June 2024 | 337 Pages

A Mouth Holds Many Things is a collection of hybrid-literary works by 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writers. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, asemic writing, multimedia poetry, and more, this print anthology illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media. The works in this collection explore the creative possibilities of language, and in so doing aim to challenge our precepts of reading and writing.

One crucial aspect of the works in A Mouth Holds Many Things is that the works sometimes manifest in multiple forms that cannot be contained by the print page alone. These works necessarily push on the boundaries of literary forms. Below are two visual poetry examples that appear as image-and-text in the pages of the book, and extend beyond the page also in the form of video poems.

–Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, Co-Editors

Complete list of contributors and more info here.

•


Carolina Ebeid, “Voice Becoming an Artifact”


Carolina Ebeid, “Wound Studies”

Samiya Bashir, “negro being :: freakish beauty”

From A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection.
All contents copyright © 2024 their respective authors.
Reprinted with permission of Fonograf Editions.

Carolina Ebeid and Samiya Bashir

Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior (2106) and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts (2023). Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. A longtime editor, she helps edit poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the online zine Visible Binary. From 2023-2025 she is the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University. 

Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multimedia poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Samiya is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories (2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

Previous

Eating Time: On Marosia Castaldi’s “The Hunger of Women”
Next

Make It News: On Chris Marker’s “Eternal Current Events”