3 Selections from "Upon the Body: Poems of/to a Black Social Epi, PT.II--LOVE//Resistance in the Time of COVID"

Abstract

The 3 poems included here are from a collection written between January and August 2020. The full collection—27 poems total—examines intersections of structural racism, racialized police violence, and COVID-19, drawing from generations of creative resistance produced and embodied by Black artists, activists, and scholars like Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Audre Lorde, Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. DuBois. The collection as a whole is crafted as counternarrative to public health’s ahistoric, apolitical, racist, and homophobic proclivities in times of crisis. The 3 poems here are from Part II, "LOVE//Resistance in the Time of COVID.” These selections make connections between social justice, structural racism, economic inequality, and public health history, weaving public health themes together with Black music, poetry, literature, and history to (re)frame/analyze the dual pandemics confronting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, and to nuance narratives of our presence/resistance. “MASKS//Exposed” and “IMMAGINATION//Immunity” do so in relation to COVID-19, while “BLACK//Gold” (written/recorded as a hip-hop track) sits at the intersection of COVID-19 and racialized police violence.