"The poems in this collection reverberate with history, reference and embodiment. Words range and jump across the page, and are interspersed with drawings, charts, and symbols. The poet has created a work of complex multi-dimensionality, much like a dance or live performance. It's not surprising that the poet asks of the reader ‘Have you considered the poetics of mathematics? of quantum physics?’ As revealed through the considerable liner notes, the poet has not only considered these things, but works in relation to artists, performers, and thinkers whose lives, past and current, intersect in layered rather than linear time.”
— Samuel Ace
"Like the most entrancing music ( and isn’t poetry a form of written music?) – isaiah hines’s null landing is a score replete with arresting sound -well crafted nuance, and originality. The narrative paths these poems take to their respective destinations are best enjoyed at a pace which runs counter to our typical frantic cadences.
They are poems which ask you to rethink that which you thought you knew, while celebrating hines’s contributions to what fellow poet Patti Smith once referred to as 'the sea of possibilities'
Let this book in your life."
— Reuben Jackson
null landing
(Slope Editions, 2022)
null landing sings the intricacies of black queer life—grappling with the sonic, visual and affective motif of "nullness,'' that is, of being without properties, having no legal or binding force, and amounting to nothing.
isaiah a. hines is a poet born in Vermont. Their debut collection, null landing, was selected as winner of the 2020 Slope Editions Book Prize and a finalist for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Their practice traverses writing, performance and teaching.
notes toward description
Soldering geologic fieldnotes and experimental performance score, null landing attempts a poetics of the uncomputable. Bad data and speculation on value emerge as creative instruments in a confrontation with colonial language and science. An extended consideration of the geopolitical encounter, this debut collection orchestrates black spatial practice, undisciplined inquiry, and performative utterance/text.
Poet and reader embark on a series of forays into archaeometallurgy, ornithology, and quantum mechanics, navigating remote sites of poetic exchange and discharge, or null islands. Meandering annotation and citation function as an ancillary mode of engaging vast underlying architectures of information and the continuum of meaning wherein ‘truth’ resides. An aerial grid recalibrates and warps to accommodate contested origin points and scattered narratives, conjuring a constellation of coordinates.
null landing dwells uncompromisingly in the interval between virtual and actual topographies, learning from and thinking with GIS enthusiasts, single-celled organisms, mineral deposits, and Black creatives across genres. Delving into the technologies by which places, persons, and raw materials are extracted and abstracted for purposes of mapping, subduing, and accumulating capital, these poems recover a suite of disavowed geospatial knowledges.
a table of contents
Foreword by Samuel Ace
i. black metallurgy
ii. marsh notebook
iii. the smallest drama
iv. pilot wave theories
liner notes
excerpts / fragments
—from "nullo"
— from "resurfaces"
—from "fusillade"
—from "so many constellations"
awards & press
- Slope Editions 19th Annual Book Prize, judged by Sam Ace
- Finalist, 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry
"I meet isaiah a. hines at the intersection of gender, the Black body, in dialogue with the greats (Gwendolyn Brook, Ntozake Shange, Jean Toomer, Saidiya Hartman, etc.) and black queer life. And just as soon as I make it past their dedication to their brothers and acknowledgement of their grandmothers' wisdom and realness I am swept away by the first poem. They write: 'This [null] is ultimately a reference to the historic and present day indifference to anti-black violence in their United States... where Black lives have been considered less than nothing. I am so excited to dig into this collection! isaiah does some interesting things with the construction of words all while centering Black interiority."
a playlist
60 songs for the 60 poems that make up null landing. doesn't necessarily have to be listened to in this order. each song doesn't necessarily correspond to a particular poem and vice versa.
“Like the most entrancing music,” with sounds, symbols, charts, drawings, and other patterns that invite enjoyment “at a pace that runs counter to our typical frantic cadences. They are poems that ask you to rethink that which you thought you knew,” —Reuben Jackson