Anastacia-Reneé

Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere

Hybrid, 2024

What if god were a Black woman? What if there were other universes, and in each universe other Black woman gods? One million versions of god, and one million saints to watch over us? And what if this Black woman god was placed here on our earth?

These are just a few of the questions Anastacia-Reneé asks in this daring and mind-bending hybrid collection. A compelling blend of poetry, micro-flash fiction, and sci-fi Afrofuturism with a prose storyline and characters that connect through family, time, and place. Anastacia-Reneé paints world(s) rich with wonder and and the paranormal as she peers into the lives of the everyday people and the spectacular creatures inhabiting not just our neighborhoods, but other dimensions. Hers is a universe of striking variety—monsters, nontraditional saints, witches, zombies, the couple in the apartment next door, the wise elders from down the block, and gods watching over us all—as well as community and connectedness.

Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere is about interstellar ancestry, community and spirituality, about the things we invoke conjure and rely on to maintain our unwavering joy as we move through life. Anastacia-Reneé’s power lies in her spellbinding storytelling—her ability to bring forth lovingly rendered characters captured in powerful brief bursts of lyrical poetry, her ability to build worlds, within worlds and the ways in which she dares us to fully love ourselves and see each other in all our complexity.

Side Notes from the Archivist

Poetry, 2023

Side Notes from the Archivist is a preservation of Black culture viewed through a feminist lens. The Archivist leads readers through poems that epitomize youthful renditions of a Black girl coming of age in Philadelphia’s pre-funk ’80s; episodic adventures of “the Black Girl” whose life is depicted through the white gaze; and selections of verse evincing affection for self and testimony to the magnificence within Black femme culture at-large.

Every poem in Side Notes elevates and honestly illustrates the buoyancy of Blackness and the calamity of Black lives on earth. In her uniquely embracing and experimental style, Anastacia-Reneé documents these truths as celebrations of diverse subjects, from Solid Gold to halal hotdogs; as homages and reflections on iconic images, from Marsha P. Johnson to Aunt Jemima; and as critiques of systemic oppression forcing some to countdown their last heartbeat.

From internet “Fame” to the toxicity of the white gaze, Side Notes from the Archivist cements Anastacia-Reneé role as a leading light in the womanist movement—an artist whose work is in conversation with advocates of Black culture and thought such as Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni.

(v.)

Poetry, 2017

“In 1974, when Ntozake Shange first released the cannon of Black girl magic known as For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, her opening stanza was a call to all of us.

“somebody/ anybody
sing a black girl’s song
bring her out
to know herself .”

This book is answer to that call.

What is sacred, what is beauty, what is tragedy, what rites of passage have we endured to be initiated into the complexities of our humanity? Anastacia-Reneé’s words frame so many questions, read like ritual, read like nursery rhymes, invoke ancestors and Becky alike in a nuanced honest reflection of this time in life.

Using a reimagined alphabet, Anastacia-Reneé sets about taking on everything from love to cancer, monsters, growing up, growing into our bodies, and the ways in which even our bodies are not our own. Her words define and redefine, explore hidden truths and expose the lies we are raised with.

These poems are stories of blackness, of queerness, of womanhood and the combination of all the identities we hold externally and internally that create the tapestry of who we are and who we want to be.”  –Reagan Jackson

Forget It

Poetry, 2017

“Anastacia Renee’s somber, shrewd and actually detailed romp through a field of landmines definitively shatters both the predictability of genre and the limits of lyric. These fierce vignettes, crafted to confront, are too restless and urgent to behave while considering their impact. Instead, they meld into a story we can’t turn away from, one that—if you need to slap it with a name—could be called poetry. But Forget It (which is all but impossible to forget) isn’t simply poetry. What it is, is simply inevitable.” –Patricia Smith

Anastacia Reneé’s Forget It draws the reader into the churning seas of dissolution — marriage, family, identity, livelihood — in language unknotted from the constraints of punctuation, syntax, sense— “eaten into seedless cherries”—and plunged into the fabular scape/scope of dreams, myth, fairytales, faith, race. Phantom births, ghosts, half-grown children, sex, betrayal, violence, anger, female body, the bloody aftermaths of dissolution sprawling, placental and umbilical, in the urgent, haunted language of dreaming and memory. City and speaker dissolve into one another, boundaries vanquished. What remains after dissolution? Talking to herself. From whence do (k)new form(s) arise? A “revelatory hymn”, matrix upon which self and sense are (re-) configured as her own, Anastacia Reneé’s Forget It dances on the grave of the lost—fiery tempest, a phoenix of language and presence. When we wake up, nothing is forgotten.