Poet and graphic designer Chaun Webster draws from an interest in the work of sign in graffiti, the layering of collage, and the visuality of text. These methods are used in Webster’s work to investigate race—specifically the instability of blackness and black subjectivities, geography, memory, and the body. Correspondingly, much of these investigations engage the question of absence—how to archive what is missing from the landscape, particularly as a number of communities watch in real time as neighborhoods once populated with familiar presences dissolve in the vernacular of redevelopment and its attendant colonial logic. Webster’s debut book, GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime, was published by Noemi Press April 2018.
on craft, or a disordered logic for resurrection
On writing to bring language to its limit: translation and failure, communion with ghosts, and the grammar of undoing.
