D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S, stevie redwood

In this debut by author stevie redwood, there is love—an abundance of love. And there is rage and dialectics and all we are capable of—all of it: the beauty and terror and generosity and dispossession and violence and collectivity and survival and deathmaking and interdependence and warfare—as beings living and dying on this earth in whatever place and time and context we’re in, for however long we’re here. It is a study and exploration of putative opposites that are actually deeply co-constitutive & in mutable laminate relationship with each other. Here, in redwood’s hands, we see our capacity and attention and choices. Maybe too, there is hope that we might resist annihilation; we might wage life against capital.

 

D A N G E R O U S  B O D I E S / A N G E R  O D E S is an invitation into curiosity, asking us to question who is us; who is we. Amid hope, this is also a provocation, or many provocations. Can we find and reach and move and be in conversation with / be moved by people who also aim to destroy the worlds that aim to destroy us? Do we know us?—meaning, loosely, maybe, people threatening to and threatened by and simultaneously necessary for and expendable to capital accumulation. This collection ask us to understand that these poems, though a work (of poetics), are not themselves “the work” that must be done. These poems remind that while there is a place for poetry & art in the world—there is much it cannot do.

D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S invites its reader to “trade notes about loving each other and killing capitalism,” and in this way, stevie redwood reminds us that poetry can still be an act of fighting back if forged with unshakable vision and resolve. Razor-sharp, heartbreaking, and vengefully vibrant, this stunning debut more closely resembles “a fist of rage; a fist of roses; the fist erected in solidarity or demand.” You can taste the blood, sweat, and tears dripping from these deviant, defiant, and devastating poems. Wield this work with caution—stevie redwood has created an enduring and formidable force to be reckoned with.

–Angel Dominguez, author of Desgraciado

 

stevie redwood’s D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S quotes the radical Grace Lee Boggs’s trenchant question “What time is it on the clock of the world?” and proposes a mobilized, mobilizing set of answers. In poems roiled by love and anger, often both at once, redwood offers encouragement and solidarity to everyone “trying to make a passage to tomorrow, // keep from falling off the face / of the clock.” Everyone who struggles against capitalist exploitation, “the warfare of property,” and oppression’s larceny of life chances. Everyone who, as redwood says, understands the stakes. D A N G E R O U S B O D I E S / A N G E R O D E S is a book about finding your people and transforming each other in the process. And again and again, at the core of such projects of transformation, redwood sees tenderness, the experience of waking up “sweating with rage / over wage labor” fusing with love for other complicated, sometimes exhausted people and becoming a drive to unmake and remake the world for the better: “to love like it’s what will save us—”

–Daniel Sarah Karasik, author of Plenitude

 

“there are so many things I want you to teach me,” writes stevie redwood in the poem “dear baby,” a poem that captures the longing & heart of their expansive debut collection Dangerous Bodies_Anger Odes. Yes, there is anger, there is disgust—often in response to the humiliations & violence individuals suffer under capitalism—in these poems, but there is also wonder, an appreciation for things as simple as “the miracle of your own finger,” especially in those moments where love in this world reveals the possibility of another where love could actually thrive. It is painful. It is brave. It is stuck in a world of blurbs & markets that will not do it justice, but that wonder remains open to another world it does not know but wants / is ready for.

–Wendy Trevino, author of Cruel Fiction