On Memory, Records, and What We Choose to Keep
I'd never seen this photo before: my grandmother in a folding chair, holding my mother and aunt on a sunny day in the 1960s. The image is slightly faded, tinted with that particular green cast of old photographs, but the moment it captures feels immediate.
My grandmother passed away last week, and as my family sorts through photographs and memories, I've been thinking a lot about what we keep, what gets lost, and how our imaginations work to fill the spaces in between. Sometimes I think that's what poetry is - an attempt to capture not just what happened, but what it felt like to be there, how it shaped us, how it lives in us still.
It feels particularly meaningful that this time of personal archive-keeping coincides with the launch of Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (Nightboat Books, 2025), a new anthology edited by Naima Yael Tokunow that explores these very questions.
Rob McLennan has written a thoughtful review of the collection, highlighting how it works to "gather together elements of what had, has or would otherwise be lost, pushing through conversations on what might emerge through and because and even despite those losses."
The anthology brings together more than forty writers exploring questions of identity, language, diaspora, and collective memory. As McLennan notes in his review, the work gathered here is "rich, evocative and very powerful." My own contribution, a poem called Flower Girl, examines how childhood memories shapeshift and grow to accommodate emotional truths that go beyond objective record-keeping - how a photograph might capture a moment, but a memory holds something more.
Permanent Record asks vital questions about who and what gets preserved in our cultural archives, and how we might reimagine these systems of remembrance. Inspired by Tokunow's research into the Black American record (and its purposeful scarceness), the anthology explores how we might engage with and transform our systems of cultural memory.
I'm honored to have my work appear alongside poets like Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, Rosa Alcalá, Em Dial, Carolina Ebeid, Jan-Henry Gray, and many other incredible voices.
The book is available for pre-order from Nightboat Books.
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