Description
About the Book
This book-length lyric is an attempt to do the math of a woman, of a family, of a country, of a diaspora. The sum of one life reveals the permutations of many: daughters, sisters, lovers. The cost of one death is uncountable. Diane Exavier’s voice has the heart-stilling gravity of a weary prophet. With The Math of Saint Felix, she has continued the work of generations. This book is ledger and legacy.
About the Author
Dispatching from the Caribbean Diaspora, Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker and educator working at the intersection of performance and poetry. Diane concerns herself with what she recognizes as the 4 L’s: love, loss, legacy and land. She is author of Teaches of Peaches published by TAR Chapbook Series in 2017, and her writing can be found elsewhere in such places as The Atlas Review and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. A 2021 Jerome Foundation Finalist, Diane holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from Brown University. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Praise for The Math of Saint Felix
Lyrical, breathless, incisive, Diane Exavier’s The Math of Saint Felix marks her as a rising star in the next generation of Black poetics, showing us the ways Black femmehood carries and rebuilds language—and the world. – Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism
The Math of Saint Felix is its own cosmos—a meticulously crafted world where equations are embedded in African diasporic crossings, the abyss of grief, and the coupling and decoupling of human relations. In a cadence all her own, and with her work in theatrical innovation and installation art informing her every move, Diane Exavier asks the reader to pay attention to everything—the shape and sound of a word, the paintings evoked by letters on vast blank spaces, the tragi-comedy of everyday living. – Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, author of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic
A playwright with poet’s DNA has made a book that is part elegy, part archive, part balm and final family portrait. Whole as an integer. Multi-voiced as choir. – Angel Nafis, author of BlackGirl Mansion
Recorded Readings & Conversations with the Author
- Diane Exavier on The Present Stage podcast, May 19, 2023
- Greenlight Books | Gather at the Integer: Diane Exavier, Shayla Lawz, Carlos Sirah & Angel Nafis
- Café con Libros | The Math of Saint Felix: Diane Exavier in Conversation with Desiree C. Bailey
- Conversations in Atlantic Theory | Diane Exavier on The Math of Saint Felix
About Our Land Acknowledgment
In support of truth-telling and reconciliation, and with the belief that a book can be a liberated and liberatory space that travels through time and across borders, the authors of the 3rd Thing books share their pages with an Indigenous writer. In 2021, that writer is poet Summer J. Hart. Her words conjure the quiet rapture and violence of our connections to place and to one another across and between the borders of time, death, waking, and creature-ness.
About Our Books as Objects
All 3rd Thing books are thoughtfully designed for people who love books…to read them, to smell them, to write in their wide margins, to tuck things in their pages. They feature recycled cover stock and French folds for holding your place. All the 2021 books are the same, perfect squares – 8″ x 8″…not too tall and not too small – so they fit neatly together on your shelf or in a stack on your coffee table…because they are so beautiful, you will want to look at them all the time.
