M Archive

"M Archive adds to and extends the critical work being done around breath, breathing, and blackness. And in so doing, it gives us a reason to breathe – independently and collectively – again."
  -- Sasha Panaram * New Black Man (In Exile) *
"Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a literary treasure. M Archive, the second book in an innovative trilogy that began with Spill, is evidence of her brilliance." * Bitch *
(Starred Review) "Groundbreaking.... This is an impressive archive 'written in collaboration with the survivors' and the mythology that Gumbs develops from the artifacts of future black life and memory works to reveal an existence 'on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.'” * Publishers Weekly *
"The end of the world is no joke! This text is clearly ambitious. More compendium than chronicle, the writing is poetic, dense, and often solemn with glimmers of dark wit." -- Gabrielle Civil * Full Stop *
"Offers a set of necessary and stimulating interventions . . . A generous work that challenges dominant views that assume that ancestral speculative work has no place in feminist theory." -- Chandra Frank * Feminist Formations *
"At turns lush and awesome, in ways that make the eyes gleam and the mind crackle with electricity, in ways that devastate and leave the spirit raw with overlain feelings of complicity and responsibility, and loving, always loving, always loving in, between, and across every single word—the beautiful and daring writing of M Archive imperatively continues the constellar work of radical Black feminism’s ongoing project of 'imagining the unimaginable.'" -- John Murillo III * Make *
"[G]round-breaking. . . . Gumbs’s trilogy embraces the lyric beauty in the acts of naming, remembering, and finding one’s way back to the source. . . . Reading Gumbs’s books feels like reading an archive that will someday, who knows maybe even someday soon, usher in an era of radical transformation." -- Kathryn Nuernberger * West Branch *
"The prose poetry collection M Archive is a rich exploration of the elements, and of Black artistry lovingly and bodily engaged with dirt, sky, ocean, and fire in a post-apocalyptic world of new and old relations. It's a book full of insights and offerings for living more consciously, for creating healing spaces in a changing world." -- Petra Kuppers * Shelf Awareness *