Shadow Farm

Shadow Farm is a poetry project based where I now live in the state of Rhode Island, investigating histories of my settler family on land of the Narragansett Indigenous nation, through a process of archiving 929 objects in my grandmother's house. The project traces the means of arrival of these objects to Narragansett territory, many of which refer to US imperial projects, international diplomacy and tourism in the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and China. This project uses and subverts forms from historical texts describing the colony of Rhode Island, including indices, word-lists, and auto-ethnographical 'observations.' I am interested in structures of orientation found in the house which speak to structures of colonization beyond the house, including salutations, arrivals, the threshold, the shelf, masks, the behind, proximity, closeness, givens, evidence, repetitions, reflections, slants, and departures.

Excerpts

Ex-gasp the House
The Poetry Project Footnotes, 2021