Nathan Alexander Moore : A note on small colossus

 

 

 

 

          I understand small colossus as a microcosm of the lessons I’ve learned over the past 5 years or so. As a writer – and just as a human being – I’ve been grappling with the question of ‘what does it mean to well?’ When I moved away from Kentucky for graduate school, to do the ‘serious work’ of being a writer, I was on my own for the first time in a long time. That brought up a lot and the residue of certain experiences revealed themselves to me in a new light. I had to think about how I was going to take care of myself, how I was going to build a life for myself. I had to contend with who I was because of my trauma and, more importantly, who I might be outside of it. In this way, small colossus is a culmination of my thinking about how to live and, perhaps, thrive in this brutal and broken world.

          The chapbook begins with “How to Write A Poem” in which I recall a conversation with my therapist and slowly reveal my current artistic practice – I write about what hurts me in the most beautiful way possible. For me, this is a grand feat. In my adolescence, I got so comfortable swallowing sentences, fading into the background, being the wallflower that vined their way to the edge of every room. When I decided to go to therapy and begin the work of taking care of myself, it felt like reaching inside myself and having to examine whatever it was that I found. Through this experience, I also discovered what it meant, for me, to be a writer. With small colossus, I’m trying to do the hard work of excavating some beauty from all the parts of my life that have sharp edges. I’m trying to bear witness not only to my own vulnerability, but to cradle with my mind and with my words what it means to survive so many tragedies both personal and communal.

           The collection begins with me, but also extends its caress by probing topics unabashedly political. This project endeavors to clarify what it feels like to live with and live through a multitude of manufactured disasters. However, I want my writing to refuse any acceptance of some totalizing defeat, to reject any attempt to extinguish one’s capacity for wonder. These poems move upon an uneven fault line of harm and healing, eschewing depictions of completeness to instead sift through ever-ongoing desires to shift and survive. These poems begin with an image of me digging into myself to salvage something gorgeous. The book end with the title poem “Small Colossus”, in which I realize there are things that want me alive. These tenacious things might be as small and wondrous as the heart in my chest. I hope my poems demonstrate the delicate but exacting labor of witnessing such striving things that continually remind me of my worth and my capacity to grow.

          As a debut collection, small colossus, serves as the preliminary limning out of my own self-conceived ethics of writing. The work of this collection is a kind of stitching, sewing some hope onto the hem of horror, a recognition that neither ever has the power to fully obliterate the other. As a Black transfemme, I constantly feel the need to appreciate again and again the things that keep me going when the world would have it otherwise. This collection is a requiem for all that I have endured and what minor but mighty things I discovered glistening in the wreckage. Through these poems I attempt to chart a Black queer poetics of care, nurturing a language that attends to wounds that are both individual and collective. With this project and beyond, I want the place I build with my language to be lush, vibrant, and blooming. I want heartbreak and hope to reside there in equal measure, without one trying to conquer or consume its counterpart.

 

 

 

 

Nathan Alexander Moore (she/they) is a Black genderfluid transfemme writer, scholar, and dreamer. She is interested in critical and creative methods to explore the nuances of Blackness, queerness, and temporality. Currently, they are a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin in the department of African and African Diaspora Studies. Their work has previously been published or is forthcoming from Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando from Damaged Goods Press, P-QUEUE, ode to Queer and Peauxdunque Review. She also loves cooking, naps, comics, and laughing. small colossus (above/ground press, 2021) is their chapbook debut.