Books

Of Being Dispersed
Simone White

Praise for Of Being Dispersed

Recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Poetry

"I get this pinwheel relationship to wisdom & history when I read Simone White. I'm in her dream, but it's a remarkable solidly packed one informed by the quotidian rarity of for instance a prose disquisition on lotion and skin and haircare especially in winter. Like Dana Ward's, her work sends me searching. Like what part of speech is here. As I'm wondering Simone sometimes exits first, and I even feel that a real piece of her poem is adamantly not here and that is her privacy, her power & her skill so what kind of quest is it, this beautiful complex & alive work. Here's my best guess. OF BEING DISPERSED is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks."
—Eileen Myles

"In Simone White's poetry the action is always multiple, palpable, sounding as thought, coming forward through this highly sensitized plane, sudden and hovering, exchanging centers, afflicted and added to by company. The continuous listening company demands—company including imaginary self, receding boundaries, the horseman on the night's street, the live, the loved, the drunk, the words, the turnstile, the endless destructive projections people force—and the rendering of that listening into irreducible depths of tone, wit, and perception constitute much of what makes OF BEING DISPERSED a masterful book. Buzzing word-love marking time beat by beat, being the ground inside and out, makes up the rest."
—Anselm Berrigan

"Macaronic plenitude of language instantiates places and states of mind. If Edouard Glissant says that we write in the presence of all the world's languages, then we have in Simone White's OF BEING DISPERSED, an underground stream reaching the surface of the page—in lines acrobatic and limber, fluent in code switch, mood shift and modes of inquiry. I read White's volume as a poetic lens on the specificities of the diaspora and the 'dispersed,' written with baroque skepticism, feminist vision and attention to the complications of a Black yet to be storyed any/where."
—Erica Hunt

About the Author

Simone White is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Poetry. She is also the author of House Envy of All the World (Factory School/Heretical Texts) and Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse/Dossier Series). She is Program Director at The Poetry Project and lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. 

Links

2017 Whiting Award for Poetry Page
Poem in Boston Review
Simone White page at the Poetry Foundation
Simone White Page Penn Sound
Selected for New American Poets series, Poetry Society of America
Poems in the Volta
Special Issue - The Recluse
Maggie Nelson on Simone White
Essay at Harriet - Poetry Foundation
 
 

Spring 2016

88 pages, 6 × 8 inches 
Paperback Poetry
ISBN 978-0996002547

$18.00 U.S.
View Buy

Spring 2016

88 pages, 6 × 8 inches 
Paperback Poetry
ISBN 978-0996002547

$18.00 U.S.
View Buy

Praise for Of Being Dispersed

Recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Poetry

"I get this pinwheel relationship to wisdom & history when I read Simone White. I'm in her dream, but it's a remarkable solidly packed one informed by the quotidian rarity of for instance a prose disquisition on lotion and skin and haircare especially in winter. Like Dana Ward's, her work sends me searching. Like what part of speech is here. As I'm wondering Simone sometimes exits first, and I even feel that a real piece of her poem is adamantly not here and that is her privacy, her power & her skill so what kind of quest is it, this beautiful complex & alive work. Here's my best guess. OF BEING DISPERSED is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks."
—Eileen Myles

"In Simone White's poetry the action is always multiple, palpable, sounding as thought, coming forward through this highly sensitized plane, sudden and hovering, exchanging centers, afflicted and added to by company. The continuous listening company demands—company including imaginary self, receding boundaries, the horseman on the night's street, the live, the loved, the drunk, the words, the turnstile, the endless destructive projections people force—and the rendering of that listening into irreducible depths of tone, wit, and perception constitute much of what makes OF BEING DISPERSED a masterful book. Buzzing word-love marking time beat by beat, being the ground inside and out, makes up the rest."
—Anselm Berrigan

"Macaronic plenitude of language instantiates places and states of mind. If Edouard Glissant says that we write in the presence of all the world's languages, then we have in Simone White's OF BEING DISPERSED, an underground stream reaching the surface of the page—in lines acrobatic and limber, fluent in code switch, mood shift and modes of inquiry. I read White's volume as a poetic lens on the specificities of the diaspora and the 'dispersed,' written with baroque skepticism, feminist vision and attention to the complications of a Black yet to be storyed any/where."
—Erica Hunt

About the Author

Simone White is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Poetry. She is also the author of House Envy of All the World (Factory School/Heretical Texts) and Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse/Dossier Series). She is Program Director at The Poetry Project and lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. 

Links

2017 Whiting Award for Poetry Page
Poem in Boston Review
Simone White page at the Poetry Foundation
Simone White Page Penn Sound
Selected for New American Poets series, Poetry Society of America
Poems in the Volta
Special Issue - The Recluse
Maggie Nelson on Simone White
Essay at Harriet - Poetry Foundation