let the dead in

Signed copy of let the dead in by Saida Agostini

Summary 

“In her remarkable book, let the dead in, Saida Agostini asks, ‘where does the story start?‘ And she answers and answers:…’with one lie, then another, then another, until a whole/world is born, and we wait, a revolt of black girls.‘ These courageous poems of blooming and brutality, of unrelenting voice and witness, take us deep into the ruthless body, into spirit-killing. These brave poems write the murder of black women, hatred of queer and trans bodies as not just common, but endemic—yet Agostini brings survival into light, brings strong black women alive and beautiful and wildly sexual: ‘we are nothing if not houses to each other that can hold/all sorts of brutal tender memory, make rooms of flesh/and light.‘”

— Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars

Saida Agostini’s first full-length poetry collection, let the dead in, is an exploration of  the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation. Audacious, sensual, and grieving, this work explores how Black women harness the fantastic to craft their own road to freedom. A journey across Guyana, London, and the United States, it is a meditation on black womanhood, queerness, the legacy of colonization, and pleasure. These poems craft a creation story fat with love, queerness, mermaids, and blackness.