_null landing_

"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’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’ 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 is an aggregator of values, figures, disavowed knowledges and discarded feelings. It sings the nuances of modern 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. Preoccupied with the ways that black people navigate spacetime, the text is a reckoning with forms of un/knowing that frustrate the equation of value. Through repeated rehearsals of the crossing from zero to infinity, or knowing to not-knowing, null landing wrestles with the threat and possibility of nonlocal modes of relation.

isaiah a. hines is a poet and researcher. Their postdisciplinary practice traverses writing, libraries, performance and criticism, speculating on matter and documentation to challenge the legitimation of “transparency” as a unitary construct and ethical syntax. isaiah was born in Burlington, Vermont, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.