Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tyree Daye

“Breathing seems individual but is also so profoundly collective,” the poet and intersectional feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs said in an interview with BOMB Magazine. Gumbs, whose most recent book, M Archive: After the End of the World, is out from Duke Press, reads with the poet and 2019 Whiting Award winner Tyree Daye. The lyric poems in Daye’s debut, River Hymns, gather and lose their breath on the banks of the Neuse River. Gumbs, whose work could be also described as an anti-academic academic text, meets Daye’s on common grounds of ancestry and the South. From her poem “Finding Ceremony: A Song for/from Seven Generations”: “stay/for the smallest sound. stay your behind right here and sit directly on the ground./ open your mouth. now give us what you found.” From Daye’s poem “Field Notes on Beginning:” “I don’t want to die in the south like so many of mine. I want to be / carried back.”