Black Body Amnesia: Poems & Other Speech Acts 2nd Edition

Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts is an evolving archive of poetry, performance, memory, grief, and Black queer imagination. Moving across poems, performance texts, critical reflection, conversations, and visual work, the second edition gathers multiple forms of expression into a body of work concerned with what remains, what disappears, and what can be remembered otherwise.

At its center is the concept of foregetting, a practice that moves beyond conventional ideas of forgetting and remembering. jaamil describes the work as an archive that imagines new possibilities for Black queer reality across the intersections of art and living, spirit and social practice.

The publication brings jaamil’s writing into conversation with artists and thinkers including Tracy K. Smith, Bill T. Jones, Ashley Ferro-Murray, and Jennifer Kidwell, alongside visual works that expand the archive through questions of shelter, witnessing, protection, memory, and return.

Through “Ontological Delay and the Afterlives of Black Performance,” the second edition further considers the relationship between Black existence, performance, recognition, and the archive. Gesture, sound, ritual, and movement become ways of carrying memory across time, treating the archive not as something fixed, but as a living space where embodiment, spirit, and imagination continue to evolve.