Paul Hlava Ceballos
A tête-bêche collaboration with Quenton Baker
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and the Poets House. His work has been published in the Best New Poets Anthology and translated into the Ukrainian. It can be found in Narrative Magazine, BOMB, the PEN Poetry Series, Acentos Review, The LA Times, among other journals and newspapers, and has been nominated for the Pushcart. Born and raised in Southern California, he has an MFA from NYU, and currently lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography. echocardiography.
This tête-bêche (head-to-toe) book is more than the sum of its parts: two poetic accounts of Empire by two different writers. Assembled from Senate documents detailing the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole, Quenton Baker’s “we pilot the blood” considers the position of blackness and the ongoing afterlife of slavery. Paul Hlava Ceballos’s “Banana [ ]” collages declassified CIA documents, corporate reports, horticultural papers and personal accounts into a bloody portrait of multinational exploitation. Between these lyrical interrogations is a contemplative interval conducted by the writer and scholar Christina Sharpe in collaboration with Torkwase Dyson’s “Hypershapes.”