Author: Isaiah A. Hines Publisher: Slope Editions (2022) NULL LANDING sings the nuances of black queer life and experiments with the motif of "nullness,'' that is, of being without properties, having no legal or binding force, and amounting to nothing. These poems commune and conspire with bacterium, birds, bodies of water, mineral deposits, and Black creatives across genres. Soldering geologic fieldnotes and experimental performance score, null landing attempts a poetics of incalculability. Bad made measure and speculation on value emerge as creative instruments in a confrontation with colonial language and disciplinarity. An extended consideration of the geopolitical encounter, this debut collection orchestrates black spatial practice, data aggregation, 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 a corollary 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 human narratives, conjuring a constellation of coordinates. null landing dwells in the intervals 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.
