In the book Side Notes from the Archivist, poet Anastacia-Reneé tells of Black culture through the lens of a feminist growing up in the 1980s. She inventories girl bands, boy bands, street scenes, and feelings of deep emotion about others—schoolmates, celebrities, fellow intellectuals and poets, and many others. Her collection in this book documents joy and pain, emerging to tell the story with descriptive resilience—suggesting the whole of her work that will make you search for more and consider the title here, and the work of the archivist and the archives.
She also brings a beautiful arrangement to her poems, side notes, and photographs. “Section I, Retroflect” delineates “attributes of the archivist” and then has two side notes, one more dictionary entry, and one more personal:
We were trying to recreate the architecture of the
burgeoning disco scene note because of the disco but
because of the symbolism of the disco (ball), or the ball ….
To read a sample of the book and to hear the lead poem read in its entirety, see here from the publisher, HarperCollins.
You can also hear the poet read from Side Notes from the Archivist and speak of this and other work online, from 2023, at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, and in conversation with choreographer, dancer, and curator dani tirrell.
Keeping (and Telling) the Past 