Chaun Webster reads from his new book of poetry “Wail Song;or wading in the water at the end of the world”

Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer living in Minneapolis whose work interrogates blackness and being as a way to interrogate the world. Webster's debut book, GeNtry! fication: or the scene of the crime, was published by Noemi Press in 2018, and received the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for poetry. His latest book of poetry Wail Song;or wading in the water at the end of the world was published in 2023 by Black Ocean.

“Chaun Webster’s dead-ass brilliant Wail Song is a counter-elegy, not because nobody died, but because ‘the body is a corpse.’ Webster re-tells us of the wholesale whalefall of retailed Black bodies in the sea, that ‘dive from which they did not emerge.’ With steeled care, Webster bears those who could not be buried, an ark of history bent toward us, moving through the pitching pitch, the deep Blackness of his unfathomable imagination.”

— Douglas Kearney, author of Sho

“The fluid musicality in Chaun Webster’s Wail Song emerges in the feeling of a sensual ensemble of black study, a new band of experimental poetics called neotropicalism, a movement made of depths and the impulse to, as the muses signal through Webster, ‘to make a noise from within the wake.’ It begins with engulfment, a philosophical question of meaning, sounding, and containment. The blue economy has its transactions in the ocean. Modernity has its transactions in blackness. It is an ontological collision of species on this planet, ‘a kind of riotous practice, an anarchy / of breathing,’ that flows in the quiet vibration of this collection. And this murmuring is pure wonder.”

— fahima ife, author of Maroon Choreography