Sonically vibrant, polyphonic, typographic experimentation gleefully strategizes resistance and life under white supremacist capitalism in Kamden Hilliard's debut collection of poems, MissSettl.
In MissSettl, is a funny, joyful, and spiteful debut collection of seriously playful poems; they carry on with impish provocation, engagement, and mourning for what has been done to our living practices. These poems lampoon rigged games of common sense, syntax, and citizenship to expose the mechanics of what Americans have become and what they might be freed into after the end of capitalism and gender, and race, and money, and property. MissSettl confronts what's in the way of love; it disrupts what limits our potential.
Kamden Hilliard is a nonbinary poet, educator, and scholar who lives in Cleveland, Ohio. They hold a BA in American Studies from the University of Hawai'i and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Kam is author of three chapbooks of poetry: distress tolerance (Magic Helicopter Press, 2016), perceived distance from impact (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), and henceforce: a travel poetic (Omnidawn Books, 2019). Kamden serves as a board member at VIDA: Women In Literary Arts, a reader at Flypaper Lit, and the 2020-2022 Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Publishing and Writing at The Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
Title: MissSettl
Author: Hilliard, Kamden Ishmael
ISBN: 9781643621401
Binding:
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: 2022-07-08
Number of Pages: 104
Weight: 0.1600 kg
MissSettl, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard's delightfully jarring debut collection, explodes assumptions about language, race, and American (post)colonialism in an age of information overload... A 21st century Dadaist or Metamodernist text, this collection demands that readers rethink the present state (and future!) of American poetics. -Diego Baez, Harriet
Kamden Hilliard is one of the most unique poets. Whether writing about blackness, settler colonialism, or racial capitalism, they 'tricc' syntax and form into something both 'skinthicc' and 'metaphysiqule.' MissSettl invites us to party inside the 'weerd' language of multiple selves dancing and transforming 'queerdum.' -Craig Santos Perez
Kamden Hilliard's language addresses the present, wherein 'thot' replaces thought-and the military-industrial complex and its several violences has proven merely a 'warflik' we might choose to watch (or not). I'm continually drawn in by Hilliard's 'Nickelodeons,' not just the one Nickelodeon (which is itself confined to a particular 90s moment we will relive) but the televisual multiplicity of myriad concurrent Nickelodeons that MissSettl evokes. Where else do we get to see, hear, or succumb to the dangerous play Hilliard is embroiled in here? -An Duplan
In MissSettl, Hilliard unsettles QWERTY and queers linguistic bedrock to unlock readers from our own stiff poetic leanings and beliefs about the 'Clotted sign, cloying signifier' that celebrity and academicians alike accommodate for small change. These poems make hypersense, are tricksters baffling the OED with alphanumeric chimeras and lines so long they yawn at their pantomime because what they mimic bores with bullshit violence: 'The university didn't mean to offend that hair ,/ but was just so demographically curious about where you come from.' MissSettl embraces everything Black and queer and I'm here for it, am shown how fuccd I am through these critiques of capitalism, ableism, and [insert hetero-entangled-ism]. No book has been this bitingly generous to me in years. -Philip B. Williams
In MissSettl (Nightboat, Apr.), nonbinary poet Kamden Ishmael Hilliard pushes against everything that inhibits genuine love and genuine self.' -Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
