Aster of Ceremonies: Poems

(Paperback)

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A polyphonic new entry in Multiversea literary series written and curated by the neurodivergentJJJJJerome Elliss Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, The Clearing, a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech (Claudia Rankine).

Aster of Ceremonies asks what rites we need now and how poetry, astir in the asters, can help them along. What is the relationship between fleeing and feeling How can the voices of those who came beforeand the stutters that leaven those voicescarry into our present moment, mingling with our own When Ellis writes, Bring me the stolen will / Bring me the stolen well, his voice is a conduit, his me is many. Through the grateful invocations of ancestorsHannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and othersand their songs, he rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom.

By weaving a chorus of voices past and present, Ellis counters the attack of all masters of all vessels and replaces it with a family of flowers. He models howas with his brilliant transduction of escaped slave advertisementswe might proclaim lost ownership over literature and history. Bring me to the well, he chants, implores, channels. Bring me to me. In this bringing, in this singing, he proclaims our collective belonging to shared worlds where we can gather and heal.

Reviews

[JJJerome Ellis] work has challenged and moved me in countless ways; I simply cant say enough good things about it.Laura Sackton, Book Riot

Praise for The Clearing

The Clearingis many things: a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech; a restless interrogation of linear time; an intimate portrait of the authors real-time experience of his stutter; a baptism in syllable and sound; and a manuscript illuminated by The Stutter. At its core is Elliss metaphor of the clearing, a place of possibility and momentary, transitory, glimpsed liberation. He invites us to meet him there.Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

Ellis was made for speaking. . . . His storytelling is deeply absorbing; and as displayed on the album it opens up portals to histories and sensitivities that are impossible to forget. . . . In Elliss poetic but political artwork, disfluency . . . becomes a means to exist outside of ordinary time, as defined by a white-dominated world.Guardian (UK)

There is a tome of philosophy in a glottal block. The Clearing is an extended meditation on the beauty of dysfluency. The stutter is a wave, a river, a passageway across time, the bridge between the sonic hold and the rocky outcrop of language. In this wondrous volume, Ellis invites us to listen to the music of the stutter as a way to think blackness and its potentiality, to gather with monks, fugitives, stutterers, and philosophers, those able to make an enclosure or a block into music. How exquisite the sounds.Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Both a theoretical investigation and a piece of resistance art in itself, pushing back against societal expectations of performative fluency . . . [and] cracking open conventional notions of linearity.Pitchfork

In The Clearing: the sound within Silence explodes into the Big Bang of words

In The Clearing: lingual universe of galaxies, meteor showers, comets, planets, and stars

In The Clearing: words edgedecorate the silence

In The Clearing: multivalent breaths of Breath, original punctuation erect fluttering cathedrals of sound

In The Clearing: leftover letters love

In The Clearing: words and letters paint sonic landscapes

In The Clearing: hieroglyphs, sacred carvings of sound erase the white line continuum

In The Clearing: make sound visible!

In The Clearing: (diss)fluency

In The Clearing: music frees the glottal stop

In The Clearing: excesses of spirit

In The Clearing: saxophones weep

In The Clearing: words become winged syllables, arrows to the ancestors

In The Clearing: Xplosion

In The Clearing: black time of tremble

In The Clearing: no white line continuum of time

In The Clearing: only phonemes, only breath, only sound

In The Clearing: breath embroiders time, is embroidered by time

In The Clearing: the collective breath, the ga(s)p

In The Clearing: silence sculpts the Word Stealth

In The Clearing: bearing witness to the Witness in breath

In The Clearing: shatters its own being

In the Clearing: if you could write paint, sculpt, or erect the sound of Silence

In The Clearing: prayer, benediction, blessing, spell, grief, lump in the throat, unshed tears, the stutter in life

In The Clearing: compels, enfolds, genuflects in grace

In The Clearing: whole in its fracturing, its fragments of breath, And word, And life

In The Clearing: is

In The Clearing: HolyM. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong!

The originality of Elliss work cannot be overstated. Here, dysfluency, blackness, music and time continually intersect and diverge, informing and reshaping each other as forces of resistance converging on the clearinga site of encounter between the dysfluent and fluent voice that generates new understandings of the creative, interpersonal, and political power of stuttering speech. Moving between the intimacy of bodies in the shared space and time of the stutter, and the broader historical landscape of slavery and its legacies, The Clearing places race at the epicentre of a growing movement to reclaim the stutter as a vital expression of the diversity and richness of our communicative lives.Maria Stuart, assistant professor of American literature, University College Dublin

Author Bio

JJJJJerome Ellis is the author of Aster of Ceremonies. He is an animal, stutterer, and artist. He is also the author and composer of The Clearing, an audio-textual project that investigates how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. His work has been presented by the Lincoln Center, the Poetry Project, MASS MoCA, REDCAT, Arraymusic, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, among others. He lives in Tidewater, Virginia, where he was raised by Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants. He dreams of building a sonic bath house!