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Key figure in LGBTQ +, African-American and Haitian art and literary culture of the 1980s and early 1990s. Assotto Saint was a trailblazer in the 1980s and early '90s who heavily contributed to increasing the visibility of contemporary Black queerness in literature and theater.
“In whatever avenue you encounter it, Saint’s work is alive with
humans and nature, sex and grief, the zeniths of Black queer life
and the perils of the AIDS crisis.” —Danez Smith, them“Assotto
Saint was, first and foremost, a war poet. He was a poet of the
AIDS war and more than that, he was a poet of the black voices of
the AIDS war, the unheard, unmentioned voices that he was desperate
to keep alive in any way he could.”—Victoria
Brownworth, Lambda Literary
"Sacred Spells is essential reading as a dissident
counter-archive that affirms Black and queer working-class life
beyond state and media necropolitics, and in a sense, we are all
living in Assotto Saint’s world now, luckily with this book to
guide us." —Urayoán Noel, The Latinx Project
"A powerful tribute to a trailblazing LGBTQ artist."—Publishers
Weekly
“The road before us looms as an infernal horizon, then
metamorphoses and appears as the cyclical Phoenix at the crossroads
of life, an intersection of evolution and revolution, where
we—baptized in the righteous anger of the Haitian Saint
Assotto—forgive and heal in the knowledge that none of us is a
cosmic orphan.”—André De Shields“Assotto was a man who created
community… And the fragmented nature of this volume accurately
reminds us of the brilliance and courage cut short. A necessary
addition that speaks directly to our world.” —Sarah Schulman“…
writing across genres with a fluidity and ferocity that allowed him
to shapeshift without losing vigor or agility. In whatever avenue
you encounter it, Saint’s work is alive with humans and nature, sex
and grief, the zeniths of Black queer life and the perils of the
AIDS crisis.”—Danez Smith, them“Assotto Saint swept in, like
Dorothy Dandridge if she’d been allowed to play Cleopatra: tall,
regal, perfectly made up, moving as if on a Milan runway with an
authority unlike any poet I’d ever seen. When Assotto spoke, it was
like French silk fabric snapped out over you… He said, ‘on my
resume write survivor.’” —Jewelle Gomez
"[Saint's] poetry constitutes his lasting legacy, being at times
fierce, angry, tender, and poignant. It is poetry that bristles
with indignation even as it aches with loss and sorrow."—Dale
Boyer, The Gay and Lesbian Review
"Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy: five hundred
incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the
visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s
integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both
historic and present." —Queer Forty Staff"Assotto Saint faces
disaster directly and fiercely throughout Sacred Spells, his
collected works. His poetry, essays, stories, and plays document,
celebrate, and grieve the lives and deaths of his friends and
partner dying of AIDS at the height of the epidemic in the 1980s.
The pages and pages of elegies, written before Saint himself died
from AIDS in 1994, serve as powerful reminders of the unforgivable
toll queer communities have paid and still pay—as well as the wild
beauty cultivated in that instability. . . Within poems, too, Saint
responds to that willful ignorance and inaction, wrestling back his
authority to define himself and his community."—Heather
Bowlan, The Anarchist Review of Books
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