Preorder
FONO35 // Esther Kondo Heller — Ar:range:ments (print; book)
$17.95
Release Date: March 11, 2025
Description
Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In Ar:range:ments, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London, the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amidst grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss.
Ar:range:ments collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Gabrielle Octavia Rucker.
Book design by Mike Corrao. Cover image by Shenece Oretha.
About the Author
Esther Kondo Heller is a poet, literary critic, and experimental filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, an Obsidian Foundation fellow, and a Ledbury Critic. They have an M.F.A. in Poetry from Cornell University 23′ and are currently, a first-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where they are working on transnational Black poetics.
Praise
AR:RANGE:MENTS is miraculous in its ability to attend to silence and absence in such a way as to invite, at every juncture, a form of visitation. Esther Kondo Heller’s deep lyrical listening and rapt seeking prove that grief is love that persists across all manner of distance. In these poems, grief becomes a gathering ground.
–Tracy K. Smith
If in the space between mutter and Mutter a dying language is born, what is borne there – in the constant opening of carrying over, in the resonant silence of a mother and child reunion – is the sound space/practice room of Pan-African speech, which animates Esther Kondo Heller’s gift. Held now in the violent conservatory, new tongues in your mouth, new flavors in your ear, are you in disarray? Yeah! It’s their loving(re)arrangement of the collective head.
–Fred Moten
Memory is the poem we live, not the poem we choose. Here, Esther Kondo Heller has offered a lost and found—a catalog of wondering—in which we can find the edges of our own losses and our own reach for language. Spend time here. Know that the space here is space for you, wide with the absences you hold.
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Press
Forthcoming