Figure Eight by Zoe Imani Sharpe

Addressed to Negation itself, these poems illuminate its dimensions and folds, voids and volumes, absences and dislocations. Rendering the density between places, centuries, buildings, bodies, and language—as a record and method—Zoe Imani Sharpe asks how desire is structured and, inversely, how it restructures itself at the point of loss. Figure Eight entangles the discrete categories of figure and ground, illustrating in the negative and double negative a poetry of fossilization and fog, of residue and recess.

Zoe Imani Sharpe's Figure Eight is the 2024 Open Reading Period Editors' Pick.