The Clearing is a piece by JJJJJerome Ellis that is bound to drive readers beyond their typical thoughts. Exploring themes of speech patterns, blackness, and music to push readers to think about liberation and history through a different lens and perspective. This book is beautifully laid out by Rissa Hochberger with a bright, eye-catching blue cover and a black, white, and blue inside. The type is simple, allowing the text to stand out and truly impact the reader.
JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing asks how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation. Stemming from Ellis’s essay “The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Volume 5, Issue 2) the present volume transcribes and translates his investigation across genres and media, turning to the page to ask: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body? Can a book be not just a manuscript, but a glottoscript? Ellis opens space for thinking liberation theoretically, historically, and lyrically.
This book is released in tandem with an album co-produced by Northern Spy / NNA Tapes and The Poetry Project. Stream selected tracks from the album here.
The Clearing will launch on November 12, 2021 at 8pm ET at The Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, in an event-co presented by The Poetry Project and ISSUE Project Room. Tickets for this in-person event have sold out, but a livestream will be available on the ISSUE Project Room event page on the day of.
Album Image by JJJJJerome Ellis and Rissa Hochberger
Design and Layout by Rissa Hochberger