The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina.

Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address. Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.

via Write With Your Spine: A Poet Sings: Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split

(via Queer Ink | Not just straight talk - Books - livemint.com)

Shobhna S. Kumar was already a well-travelled social entrepreneur—born in Fiji, raised in Sydney, Australia; worked a bit in the US—when she moved to India eight years ago.

After 20 years in the development sector, during which she worked with a multiple strata of people, she wanted her life of “transitions” to make one more—with Queer Ink.

Eureka moment Kumar found that a lot of queer literature in India was academic, but the number of publications were not representative of the number of queer people in India. “My idea is to have a platform where all material, even in regional language, is available and to encourage people to write and publish,” she says.

Through her years of travel in India, Kumar realized that people could not find the books they wanted. People were just not comfortable going to a book store fearing unwarranted attention, which is how the idea of an online store germinated.

How to be an illustrator by Darrel Ress, reviewed by Amy at Pikaland

Illustrators in Malaysia are far and in-between. There’s not even a college or university that devotes a curriculum to hone their skills. What comes closest are those who lump graphic design and multimedia learning together, so that they can churn out students who are employable. I didn’t even realize that this was a career option at first!

But illustration is so much more than that. It’s about relaying information through your ideas, and turning concepts into drawings. It’s not about drawing for drawing’s sake – there’s problems to solve, briefs to think about and information to process. In order for me to gain better insight into the world of illustration, I picked up How to be an Illustrator by Darrel Rees last year.

flol:

Alycia Martin’s ‘Bibliographic’ installations