Now Available! Close Is… and Hopscotch Between the Living and the Dead
By Shanta Lee, A Hybrid Tête-Bêche Double Feature
Close Is… and Hopscotch Between the Living and the Dead
Now Available—A Hybrid Double Feature Of Poetry And Creative Non-Fiction Prose by Shanta Lee
In this double feature of a hybrid work of poetry and creative non-fiction prose, readers experience a relentless contemplation through a woven tapestry of human connections, estrangements, and the complex, often painful dynamics that bind us. What is the exchange rate for human closeness? Within one part of the collection, Close Is... holds a direct and unflinching mirror to humanity, forcing the question: Is human connection worth the emotional, psychical, and spiritual exchange rate? Who and what should be considered our own if our own, the human species, causes inevitable beauty and pain within our attempts to create, breach, sever, and explore the range of human relationships. And does the answer lie in expanding our horizon beyond what we consider as...human. Hopscotch Between the Living and the Dead descends into the depths of a family narrative through vivid imagery and scenes that encapsulate us within linguistic hopscotch as it unzips. A childhood game that instructs players to move forwards and backward within a chalk-drawn board on concrete, Hopscotch takes readers through a labyrinthian path of family secrets, the living and the dead, and a reckoning with surfacing the unseen of memory through vivid fragments across time.
This double volume adventures through the liminal spaces of being human while containing an abyss of yearning to close the gap between ourselves and others. At any cost.
Bibliographic Information
32pp. (Close Is…), 36pp. (Hopscotch), tête-bêche hybrid collection, paperback
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Author: Shanta Lee
Location: Doha, Qatar & Richmond, VA
Distribution: Distributed by Diode Editions
Themes: Human Relationships, Kinship, Affinity, Bonds, Family, Human Bonding, Relationship With Places, Hard And Uncomfortable Truths
From the Tête-bêche Hybrid Collection
...(the what if)¹⁰⁰⁰ / No
No I said, not brazen, not bold, not pride-just No speaking the bar stool’s steel through spine.
The stranger in shock at my answer as I asked my own question,
What if...
What if getting too close to those like you is a liability?
HOPSCOTCH BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
Our best moment was the prank call to the PBS phone-a-thon. We thought it would
be cool to watch their reaction as we made a phone call to tell them that we were
witnessing a house on fire across the street.
There was a fire, but the wrong house.
There was a fire. However, it’s the kind no one can put out.
About the Author
Shanta Lee is a writer across genres, a visual artist and a public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that is widely featured. Winner of the National Arts Strategies - New England Creative Community Fellowship and the Abel Meeropol Social Justice award, she was the creator and producer of Vermont Public’s “Seeing...the Unseen and In-Between within Vermont’s Landscape.” Shanta Lee is a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine and Art New England. Shanta Lee is also the author of the poetry collection GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Within this illustrated poetry collection, Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) is a work that Shanta Lee describes as a 2,000+ year-old phone line opened to Ovid as well as an interrogation of the Greek mythos while creating her own new language in this work. Illustrated by Alan Blackwell, Black Metamorphoses has been named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and longlisted for the 2021 Idaho Poetry Prize. Her study guide, “Metamorphoses: “Erysichthon” by Ovid and “Erysichthon’s Seed”: Race, Class, Gender, and the Imperial Body”, explores her work in comparison with Ovid and Ted Hughes’s interpretation of Ovid. Shanta Lee’s latest work, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The... (Harbor Editions, 2024) is in direct communication with the ancient mythology of the wild hunt — Wilde Jagd , Wild Hunt or Chase in German — in which supernatural/ghost riders are pursuing a target. With poetic and prosaic elements infused with some parts field guide, some parts instruction and notes of the cautionary, this work poses big questions that erode the boundary between ourselves within our human skin suits and the natural world. This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter also raises questions about what constitutes prey and predator. How does identity — as animal or as human, within skin inheritance, within human intimacy, as gendered bodies, as predator or as prey — determine how and why we participate in the wild hunt? What happens when the hunter and the hunted change places? And is the most dangerous and lethal kind of slaughter in fact bloodless?
Shanta Lee is the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts and 2020 gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council’s board of directors. As a visual artist, Shanta Lee’s multimedia exhibitions have included Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine – a work that includes her short film, interviews, and photography, and items from the museum's permanent collection – has been on view at the Bennington Museum, the Fleming Museum of Art, and the Southern Vermont Arts Center. Shanta Lee has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com.