Ruth Ellen Kocher - Böcker

A gathering of innovative, speculative fictions by writers of color, both established and emerging  The innovative fictions in Infinite Constellations showcase the voices and visions of 30 remarkable writers, both new and established, from the global majority: Native American/First Nation writers, South Asian writers, East Asian writers, Black American writers, Latinx writers, and Caribbean and Middle Eastern writers. These are visions both familiar and strange, but always rooted in the mystery of human relationships, the deep honoring of memory, and the rootedness to place and the centering of culture.The writers in this anthology mirror, instruct, bind and unbind, myth-make and myth-invert, transform and transmute, make us belly-laugh or hum our understanding, gasp or whisper gently, and remember that sometimes we need to holler and fight as we grieve. Any dangers herein, imagined or observed in poem and story, transport us: moving from latent to extant, then unleashed.This work does not presume; it presents and blossoms, creating a constellation of appearances, a symphony of belonging.“In collecting this work,” note editors Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura, “we felt humbled by the love threaded throughout the voices speaking to us in stories and poems that vault beyond expectation and settle in our consciousness as an expansion of what’s possible when we tend to one another with intention. We felt lifted, held aloft in these arrangements of language. We hope that as you read each story and poem, you will find the same sense of empowerment and celebration that we know has sustained us over countless generations, and in their beauty and humor and intelligence and complexity, continue to enrich us still.”CONTRIBUTORSGeorge Abraham / Kenzie Allen / Shreya lla Anasuya / Thea Anderson / Wendy Chin-Tanner / Alton Melvar M. Depanas / Yohanca Delgado / Jennifer Elise Foerster / Aerik Francis / AndrÉ O. Hoilette / Brian K. Hudson / K. Ibura / Pedro Iniguez / Ruth Ellen Kocher / Ra’Niqua Lee / Tonya Liburd / Kenji C. Liu / Shalewa Mackall / Lucien Darjeun Meadows / Melanie Merle / Juan J. Morales / Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint / Cindy Juyound Ok / Daniel JosÉ Older / Soham Patel / Lynn C. Pitts/ Kahadijah Queen / Sheree RenÉe Thomas /  Sarah Sophia Yanni / dg nanouk okpik / shakirah peterson

Poems that consider the human body as a meeting place of the infinite and the mortal.  Starting with the idea that the human experience is the universe looking back at itself, godhouse takes the notion a few steps further by centering cosmology within a raced and gendered body. Ruth Ellen Kocher’s poems envision this body as a union of god and soul that, within our material world, encompasses love and hate, joy and despair. The body is a site of divine presence made mortal, electrified with the resonance of both the infinite and the human. In godhouse, we encounter the body as a site where the universe is made personal and celebratory, where the celestial endure the complications of flesh and friction forms between the glorious and the monstrous aspects of personhood.

A surreal poetry collection considering memory and self-discovery through the character of the archon, the keeper of the mental archive.  In Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Archon / After, the archive is revealed as both a form of violence and of memory, of site and of event. As keeper of the archive, Kocher’s archon determines what pieces of the past may be preserved, housed, documented, ordered, and reviewed. Through these poems, the archon dives deep into memories and into the mysteries of daily life, and, in governance over the future, determines what will be and should be forgotten. The act of forgetting becomes archival violence, with the archon not only serving as the guardian of what remains in the archive but also as an eradicator who decides what is purged.  The imagistic and surreal language of this collection invites us to explore a non-logical terrain as we follow  the protagonist into her darkest memories and find a path for our own journey of self-discovery.

Poetry. African-American Studies. "This versatile poet blinks at nothing under thestars. Speaking and singing in the many voices and key signatures of poetry, our primal human language, Kocher shines and sheds visible and audiblelight" - Al Young