Rimming the Event Horizon
by Sabeen Chaudhry
Rimming the Event Horizon gyrates a mutinous poetics of revenge, purposing contingency as a major mechanism of racialisation but also as a source of resistance and refusal, of material and imaginative possibility. It is not really a punitive poetics but rather, ‘a constant, experimental exercise of antagonism,’ a brutally disruptive ‘xenogenerosity’ (Harney & Moten).
This is a collection of many rotations, revolutions and revolts, from the lick of the cyclone to the whirl of a dervish; the flick of a dragon’s tail to the ultra-slow swirl of galaxies or precarious life circling the drain. Traversing metastable topologies of gender and race as complicitly mattered but also ‘out of control,’ Rimming the Event Horizon intra-venes in a universe(s) that must simultaneously avenge, and take revenge on itself. Looping the line between life and death, it dangles us over the edge headfirst, tongues out..
ISBN: 9781739393946
96 pages
Date published: 06/10/2023
Paperback
"Sabeen Chaudhry's Rimming the Event Horizon is an index of "oracular horrors," both "asymptomatic" and "vicious animal". This is a work of devastation in the present but also "one of many aftermaths." Chaudhry invites a reading of the poem as "bruised verticality." A livid ghost shares space with wrecked daughters at the rim of a well. Is this the portal? "LICK CYCLONE" is the instruction. In this way, a reader's opacity weakens. There's nowhere not to look."
– Bhanu Kapil
"Sabeen Chaudhry’s Rimming the Event Horizon reads like the liner notes to a new PAN record. Which is to say that this is word-sound-power emanating from inside a limestone cave where you can’t quite tell if the stalactites are dripping water or sweat. Chaudhry’s secret though is that this cave is no arid zone, no non-place. Instead, Rimming the Event Horizon contains enough of the historical mess of empire, nation and memory to let us know." that this brilliant poet is ‘screaming through the flag’.
– Dhanveer Singh Brar (writer, research, teacher / member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective & Lovers Discourse)
