Books

Wild Peach
S*an D. Henry-Smith

Wild Peach is a multisensory roaming of landscape and interior, often (but not always) in near stillness and varying light. The power to disrupt and obscure language is an essential tool in protecting this multimodal endeavor; in this project, poetry and photography warm the taste of memory, exploring nonlinear, non-narrative time through the sonic offerings of image and text—and the Outdoors, the interpersonal, and all offered onto. Black Secrecy demands and provides a spirit of collaboration, study, and play. Rest without guilt. Two steppin' in the parking lot. Screaming into the night sky. In the garden and the noise, what must be learned from the garble? We listen. The ocean is always just over your shoulder.

Praise for Wild Peach

Exploiting the sonic resources of language, particularly in its use of the long vowel, Wild Peach resonates as spell, spilling into enchantment and trance. We witness the natural world as though through an aperture—a fecund world of seed and plant, dirt and flowers, worms and milkweed, and the many other small acts and creatures of nature. With the sonic and the visual as its axis, Wild Peach sows a bittersweet garden seeded with anecdotal memory counterpointed by lambent, photographic images by Henry-Smith themself. In this garden words call us to sound them out as if newly hatched into newness; words that need to be loved by the tongue and which ask our mouth to hold and savour them lovingly. Replete with recipes, nourishment and verbal mouthfeel, Wild Peach is embodied poetry for the gut, the soul, the head and the heart that satisfies our senses on many levels. Wild Peach insists on being read. Out loud. On being seen. And, in radical acts of sociality, on being heard.
—M. NourbeSe Philip

To exist is beauty itself. Existence through surrender, through love and angst, through being. This is the lush landscape one gathers and is eagerly cocooned by while reading Wild Peach. S*an Henry-Smith massages elemental frequencies like one would massage herbs for a spiritual bath. While Wild Peach invokes for me Ntozake Shange and Rirkrit Tiravanija in this dazzling installation of recipes, spells and images, embodied here is the whimsical torch song, the keratin supernova and aerial sermons that may in fact inoculate us in this age of woke blindness. The statement what is truly hours is a gentle fury and urgent glory S*an salvages within these pages. This collection dances in alliteration and magic, whirling a tapestry of visual language that allows the reader to unravel one crucial fact: we exist. Whether it is the curlicue of hair burned by exposure or S*an’s ministry of flora weaving and dangling like Anansi, this offering will outlast the archive. 
—LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
 
Wild Peach is a beautiful, life-and-death-affirming book. S*an's multisensory and sensuous language presses into the gaps and blockages between inner and outer experience.
—Hannah Black

Oh, wildness. Our first home. Reading S*an D. Henry-Smith’s work is an eternal summer of becoming. I become a restful being again, sleeping the “raw sleep of flowers,” where Blackness is everything and timeless. These soft, hardy worlds Henry-Smith weaves are a tribute to the beauty of our survival. Politicians hold no power here. This is between us and the “enduring apothecary” of the earth. Let Wild Peach unfurl you like new spring ferns as the “glory spell to end your nightmare."
—Nikki Wallschlaeger

About the Author

S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist and writer working primarily in poetry, photography, and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. They have received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, Poets House, Denniston Hill, Antenna/Paper Machine and elsewhere. S*an collaborates with Imani Elizabeth Jackson as mouthfeel; their book Consider the Tongue explores histories of aquatic labor and Black food through cooking, poetry, and ephemeral practices. S*an is also the author of two chapbooks, Body Text and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System; Wild Peach is their first full length collection. 


Fall 2020

160 pages, 6 × 8 inches 
Paperback Poetry / Photography
978-1733038423

Temporarily unavailable

$20 U.S.
Buy

Fall 2020

160 pages, 6 × 8 inches 
Paperback Poetry / Photography
978-1733038423

Temporarily unavailable

$20 U.S.
Buy

Wild Peach is a multisensory roaming of landscape and interior, often (but not always) in near stillness and varying light. The power to disrupt and obscure language is an essential tool in protecting this multimodal endeavor; in this project, poetry and photography warm the taste of memory, exploring nonlinear, non-narrative time through the sonic offerings of image and text—and the Outdoors, the interpersonal, and all offered onto. Black Secrecy demands and provides a spirit of collaboration, study, and play. Rest without guilt. Two steppin' in the parking lot. Screaming into the night sky. In the garden and the noise, what must be learned from the garble? We listen. The ocean is always just over your shoulder.

Praise for Wild Peach

Exploiting the sonic resources of language, particularly in its use of the long vowel, Wild Peach resonates as spell, spilling into enchantment and trance. We witness the natural world as though through an aperture—a fecund world of seed and plant, dirt and flowers, worms and milkweed, and the many other small acts and creatures of nature. With the sonic and the visual as its axis, Wild Peach sows a bittersweet garden seeded with anecdotal memory counterpointed by lambent, photographic images by Henry-Smith themself. In this garden words call us to sound them out as if newly hatched into newness; words that need to be loved by the tongue and which ask our mouth to hold and savour them lovingly. Replete with recipes, nourishment and verbal mouthfeel, Wild Peach is embodied poetry for the gut, the soul, the head and the heart that satisfies our senses on many levels. Wild Peach insists on being read. Out loud. On being seen. And, in radical acts of sociality, on being heard.
—M. NourbeSe Philip

To exist is beauty itself. Existence through surrender, through love and angst, through being. This is the lush landscape one gathers and is eagerly cocooned by while reading Wild Peach. S*an Henry-Smith massages elemental frequencies like one would massage herbs for a spiritual bath. While Wild Peach invokes for me Ntozake Shange and Rirkrit Tiravanija in this dazzling installation of recipes, spells and images, embodied here is the whimsical torch song, the keratin supernova and aerial sermons that may in fact inoculate us in this age of woke blindness. The statement what is truly hours is a gentle fury and urgent glory S*an salvages within these pages. This collection dances in alliteration and magic, whirling a tapestry of visual language that allows the reader to unravel one crucial fact: we exist. Whether it is the curlicue of hair burned by exposure or S*an’s ministry of flora weaving and dangling like Anansi, this offering will outlast the archive. 
—LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
 
Wild Peach is a beautiful, life-and-death-affirming book. S*an's multisensory and sensuous language presses into the gaps and blockages between inner and outer experience.
—Hannah Black

Oh, wildness. Our first home. Reading S*an D. Henry-Smith’s work is an eternal summer of becoming. I become a restful being again, sleeping the “raw sleep of flowers,” where Blackness is everything and timeless. These soft, hardy worlds Henry-Smith weaves are a tribute to the beauty of our survival. Politicians hold no power here. This is between us and the “enduring apothecary” of the earth. Let Wild Peach unfurl you like new spring ferns as the “glory spell to end your nightmare."
—Nikki Wallschlaeger

About the Author

S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist and writer working primarily in poetry, photography, and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. They have received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, Poets House, Denniston Hill, Antenna/Paper Machine and elsewhere. S*an collaborates with Imani Elizabeth Jackson as mouthfeel; their book Consider the Tongue explores histories of aquatic labor and Black food through cooking, poetry, and ephemeral practices. S*an is also the author of two chapbooks, Body Text and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System; Wild Peach is their first full length collection.