Isaac Pickell - Agitated Into Questioning

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sea lion whiskers, poetry as a feeling organ / agitated into questioning / mimesis / if time travel isn't true I don't want to be true / didn't do it for the 22,480/yr / 'pronouns of knowing' / C. Riley Snorton / I am the thinker that excites me most / theoretically-adjacent poetry / Rob Halpern / Kevin Latimer / thinking by seeking / Taylor Byas / terror of limitlessness and time / the precarity of the resource of life as source of meaning / hand-drawn infographics / we need to waste our energy and time, contend with the byproducts of our productivity / waste is something that happens, not something that is / before the production of wreckage / there is a cat, you're just a cat / it feels like a sunset all of the time / I want leisure to be everything / the Fermi Paradox / Froyo and other meritocracies / commuter who hugs tight to their well-soiled lane / machines are a miracle for anyone who gets to control them / poetry is going to have to sacrifice the page / poetry as 3-dimensional object / poet as prospective propagandist / the world is so fucked at this moment but in a way which is boring / Alice Phoebe Lou / Loving / Noname

Raised in Michigan near the back of his parents’ used bookstore, Isaac Pickell is a biracial poet & PhD candidate at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he teaches and studies the borderlands of blackness and black literature. a graduate of Miami University's MFA program, his work’s been featured in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Missouri Review, and Ninth Letter, you can find his newest stuff online at Perhappened, Protean Magazine, or Sixth Finch, his chapbook everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and his forthcoming full-length debut from Black Ocean in 2023. Isaac has taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.

His dissertation, “Passing Over, Passing Through: Transgressive Ambiguity Beyond the Colorline,” reimagines the literary and cultural history of “passing” through its growth as a contextually bound cultural phenomenon applied not only to race, but other socially constructed and rigid categories which preoccupy the American landscape, including gender, sexuality, and citizenship. by developing “passing” as a critical lens for considering various representations of ambiguous identity, Isaac hopes to promote analysis of other “category crises” grounded in and sensitive to the ongoing story of racial passing.

https://www.isaacpickell.com/