Hailed as “profoundly talented” by The Stranger, quenton baker’s hypnotic and intoxicating new poetry collection asks, “What is it like to love and be loved in a body that the world sees as monstrous?”
The defining characteristic of a monster is that all violence visited upon it is righteous. “Monsters” threaten the logic of reality and so cannot be harmed, only vanquished. Black and trans folks share with monsters the fate of existing as bottomless receptacles for justified violence. Both live as liminal beings that both require and sustain myth, simultaneously defining the borders of what is and is not human.
baker’s poems explore what it means when the reviled and the desired still must live, survive, love, and create the possibility of care, even if, for those who benefit from their abjection, they only exist as over-watched objects to be acted upon, as libidinal beings that haunt and excite from outside of time. These poems ask how desire functions when it is both an avenue for pleasure and care and an excuse for endless violence.
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 the2018 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 This Glittering Republic (Willow Books, 2016) and we pilot the blood (The 3rd Thing, 2021).
ISBN: 9798888906552
Publication date: April 6, 2027
Praise for ballast and quenton baker
“Baker is a profound talent. Read their books, and break open your mind in so doing.”
—Katie Lee Ellison, The Stranger
“Quenton Baker’s ballast is a beautiful, hard, and necessary book. Raging, electric, precise and elegiac. It is a lamentation in three parts. A brilliant refusal; a black perseverance."
—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
“ballast is erasure executed at the most exacting level. Erasure as excavation. Erasure as return. As in: return to the people what they are owed. Even when what they are owed is irrecoverable, though in these luminous [re]nderings, Baker gets us closer to beginning to understand how much has been lost, and returns us to ourselves, as the best poets tend to do.”
—Marwa Helal, author of Ante Body
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