M Archive

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, also published by Duke University Press; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder and director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.

"M Archive adds to and extends the critical work being done around breath, breathing, and blackness. And in so doing, it gives us a reason to breathe – independently and collectively – again."- Sasha Panaram (New Black Man (In Exile)) "Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a literary treasure. M Archive, the second book in an innovative trilogy that began with Spill, is evidence of her brilliance." (Bitch) (Starred Review) "Groundbreaking.... This is an impressive archive 'written in collaboration with the survivors' and the mythology that Gumbs develops from the artifacts of future black life and memory works to reveal an existence 'on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.'” (Publishers Weekly) "The end of the world is no joke! This text is clearly ambitious. More compendium than chronicle, the writing is poetic, dense, and often solemn with glimmers of dark wit." - Gabrielle Civil (Full Stop) "Offers a set of necessary and stimulating interventions . . . A generous work that challenges dominant views that assume that ancestral speculative work has no place in feminist theory." - Chandra Frank (Feminist Formations) "At turns lush and awesome, in ways that make the eyes gleam and the mind crackle with electricity, in ways that devastate and leave the spirit raw with overlain feelings of complicity and responsibility, and loving, always loving, always loving in, between, and across every single word-the beautiful and daring writing of M Archive imperatively continues the constellar work of radical Black feminism’s ongoing project of 'imagining the unimaginable.'" - John Murillo III (Make) "[G]round-breaking. . . . Gumbs’s trilogy embraces the lyric beauty in the acts of naming, remembering, and finding one’s way back to the source. . . . Reading Gumbs’s books feels like reading an archive that will someday, who knows maybe even someday soon, usher in an era of radical transformation." - Kathryn Nuernberger (West Branch) "The prose poetry collection M Archive is a rich exploration of the elements, and of Black artistry lovingly and bodily engaged with dirt, sky, ocean, and fire in a post-apocalyptic world of new and old relations. It's a book full of insights and offerings for living more consciously, for creating healing spaces in a changing world." - Petra Kuppers (Shelf Awareness) "This is the second collection of a triptych that breaks so many molds in form, language, and perspectives. Alexis Pauline Gumbs ponders the landscape in a post-apocalyptic world, particularly for Black people that face environmental racism and dying capitalism. In the context of embodying Black feminist theory, the poems point to race, politics, feminism, healing, and the environment. It is a fresh approach to understanding the many nuances of environmentalism." - Dorsía Smith Silva (Literary Hub)

• A Note  ixFrom the Lab Notebooks of the Last Experiments  3Archive of Dirt: What We Did  31Archive of Sky: What We Became  71Archive of Fire: Rate of Change  89Archive of Ocean: Origin  105Baskets (Possible Futures Yet to Be Woven)  133Memory Drive  185Acknowledgments  213Notes  217Periodic Kitchen Table of Elements  227