The high alive

de Carlos Sirah

"THE HIGH ALIVE: AN EPIC HOODOO DIPTYCH, published tête-bêche (head to toe), is made up of "The Light Body" and "The Utterances." Together, they take up excess and extinction in speculative lyric. Page is transformed into space for a performative prose in this mythopoesis of blackness and queerness, of return and foray. "The Light Body" surveys the spiritual architecture of the site where longing encounters memory, and grief allows survival, inside and against the reverberations of war. Noah and Micah return to their home in rural Mississippi, where the lovers call upon--SHU--, a manifestation of the owner of roads and doors. The lovers embark on a journey that takes them from home to the woods to the desert to the wilderness. In "The Utterances," The War that Settled Dust reorganized the city. One thousand years later, Theory of Bessie, a cult devoted to recollection--of fragment, of breath, of sound--invite us to consider the besieged body, family, city. Moving beyond apocalypse, Theory of Bessie, invite us to consider collective redress; claiming, that amidst ruin, there is always possibility."--