Quenton Baker
A tête-bêche collaboration with Paul Hlava Ceballos
Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Their current focus is black interiority and the afterlife of slavery. Their work has appeared in The Offing, Jubilat, Vinyl, The Rumpus and elsewhere. They are a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the recipient of the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. They were a 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence and a 2021 NEA Fellow. They are the author of we pilot the blood (The 3rd Thing, 2021) and ballast (Haymarket Books, 2023).
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.”