Remi will read from the collection and be in conversation with poet, writer and clinical psychologist Sanah Ahsan.
coal was the winner of the inaugural Prototype Prize (short-form category) in 2024, selected by judges Bhanu Kapil, Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Price.
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
‘coal is a poignant engagement with Black trans history. Remi Graves’ search for the elusive presence of Paul Downing in the archive perfectly captures the sense of longing for connection across time.’ Onni Gust
Blackfriars Bridge, 1905. A Black Cherokee man is arrested and charged as a ‘wandering lunatic’. In the City of London asylum, he is photographed; looking directly at the camera, he insists and refuses. He dies in the asylum one year later.
In the absence of Paul Downing’s own account, Remi Graves writes from and into the trans archive, presenting a sequence of poems and experiments mapping resonances between selves across historical records. Through river crossings and library passes, chance meetings and visitations, coal is a document that interrogates what we do with the scattered fragments of a life.
Remi Graves is a poet and drummer from London. A former Barbican Young Poet, their work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, at St Paul’s Cathedral and in various anthologies. Their debut pamphlet, with your chest, was published by fourteen poems in 2022. coal won the inaugural Prototype Prize (short-form category) in 2024.
Sanah Ahsan is a poet, writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Sanah’s work plays in the wild terrain of woundedness, the sacred landscapes of falling apart, centering compassion and embracing each other’s madness. Their work draws on therapeutics, embodiment and poetics as life-affirming practices. Sanah’s poetry has been published widely, including The Poetry Review, Rialto, The London Magazine, bath magg and more. They were awarded the Outspoken Prize and have been shortlisted for The Queen Mary New Writing Prize, White Review Prize, Bridport Prize and Frontier Poetry Prize. Sanah’s debut poetry collection I cannot be good until You say it was published with Bloomsbury March 2024, shortlisted for The Forward Prize, and selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry books.
‘Remi Graves’ coal performs a circuit between “seeing” and “knowing”, an experiment in saturation and narrative that is immensely moving. It “did something to me”, as Graves writes, evoking a book that’s closed without the place being marked. Open the book and there it is, a page you did not expect to see. Here is Paul, who died on the summer solstice in 1906. Imagine the sun burning a hole through the paper. Look through the hole and there’s Paul, living and dying in excess of the archive’s capacity to behold his extent and possibility. Leave flowers on the ground. Write. Keep going until you reach it, the place where “times touch”, and a portal opens.’ – Bhanu Kapil
‘This is a searing, spectral excavation of Black transmasculine fugitivity, where its archive is both wound and portal. Through a lyricism that is at once tender and unflinching, Graves conjures Paul Downing, a Black Cherokee trans man un/lost to the violent annals of history, staging a transtemporal communion that defies the linearity of time. With poems that oscillate between elegy and incantation—indeed, prayerful blasphemy—Graves refuses a necropolitical gaze, opting instead for a poetics of shimmering possibility.’ – Marquis Bey
