SPEECH by Jill Magi

Comfortable neither with the self who is made entirely through autonomy or genealogy, SPEECH tracks the western-world idea of freedom, asking whether the person who believes they can say and write whatever they want is more free or less aware of the nature of free speech as a right everywhere. Formally, SPEECH invokes the action of walking and weaving: enjambed lines that accrue, building pages vertically through repetition of sound, syntax, and metrical patterning. In the book, a woman walks, threading her way through a cityscape that overlays west and east, here and there, past and present, self and other, creating a place and person neither and both.

Jill is a poet, artist, and educator who works in text, image, and textile. The author of six books of poetry and numerous handmade books and book-arts objects housed at the University at Buffalo Poetry Collection, Jill ran Sona Books for ten years, publishing chapbooks of experimental works that she described as “risky, quiet, and community-based.” Her most recent book, SPEECH (Nightboat 2019), is set in a city of middles: something like the Middle East and something like the Midwest of the US where the fictional wanderer who navigates these places resides in a female body of middle age. Her other full-length books of poetry are LABOR, SLOT, Cadastral Map, Torchwood, and Threads, all published by small presses dedicated to innovative and experimental literature.

Based in the UAE, JARA Collective is a publishing project started by Sarah Almehairi, Shamma Al Bastaki, and Jill Magi. To be fluid; to constellate. JARA feels networked, where our intersecting lines–sometimes lines of walking/driving, of flight, and internet lines–intersect or hover together with density around/inside Abu Dhabi. Is the energy of “UAE-ness” sensing that for nearly every person “here” there is a “there” being navigated via internet, bank transfer, passport, wanderline, city-space, desert-space, sending gifts to another home. Maybe this is the ideal place for poetry.