quentonbaker.bsky.social 🇨🇩🇸🇩🇵🇸

ballast enters the world today. it took seven years and a whole mess of effort/grace/love from a lot of folks to make it possible, and i am profoundly grateful. may it live a long life.

@GabrielleBates i'll say never and just be surprised when it works 👀

I’m not saying a person should never use the construction “I too…” in a poem, or never use an “O ____” direct address near the end of a poem, but I do think it’s rewarding to question those & other common moves when they appear in drafts & try different language, just to see.

@NatashaOladokun it's actually unbearable tbh 😭❤️

@NatashaOladokun listennnnnnnnn 👀

@IntifadaBatata that's phenomenally kind; thank you! 😭

@QuentonBaker You've genuinely written one of my favorite recent books & I know it's going to unlock so much for my students' thinking. Was talking to Natasha Trethewey about ballast when we were having a back & forth on erasure and I gifted her one of my haymarket author copies of the book 😭

Finalizing my book list for the first class I'm teaching this fall, which I'm titling "The Lyric I & its Discontents" & ngl... I'm SO incredibly hyped to read these legends with my students!!! @23cschwartz @QuentonBaker @FadyJoudah @Anasemia

UC Irvine, one of the most sterile backdrops for a college campus you will ever witness. And a woman with a soul

natasha is truly the best of us. please help them out❤️ gofundme.com/f/help-natasha…

ballast is a year old today. the world is a year worse, a year more genocidal. grateful to have this work in the world and thankful to everyone who has engaged with it; deeply sad this is the world we work in and against. haymarketbooks.org/books/2005-bal…

@hystericalblkns @NifMuhammad @mnourbese @WindhamCampbell so lovely to see your work celebrated so widely! huge congrats!

@TheOceanIsGay this is my whole career lol. i choose to believe that if the work is good (and yrs 10000% is) then the shit evens out over time

@BarotRick it's hard to rock with the minstrelsy in dream songs

I'm not sure if John Berryman is much on the poetry radar these days, but some of his Dream Songs are never far from my mind or from my sense of being a poet. Especially this one, which I've been haunted by for decades...

2024 we not arguing back and forth with people who want to kill us

@carolynownbey i appreciate you sitting with it! 🖤

@QuentonBaker Not kind, just honest! This is a phenomenal piece of writing. It is gorgeous & terrible; it so sharply indicts centuries of anti-black violence & erasure. That much was apparent even before I got to "Washing the Bones." An astonishing achievement, truly. I thank you for it. ♥️

I have just finished, in one sitting, @QuentonBaker's *ballast* ... & tho I rarely comment on literature like this, I feel compelled to say: ballast is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I have ever encountered. I am astonished, bereft, shaken. A profound experience.

Refaat Alareer reads from Light in Gaza

zero punctuation gang pull up

my sibbbb 🥺❤️

Really grateful that my books are published with presses who express principled, material support for Palestinians, esp in times like these. Support ALL of these amazing & brave presses, esp the smaller ones who need us now more than ever