This month we are celebrating the titles that we’ve acquired in the past six months. These manuscripts came to us through our open reading periods and our 2017 Hudson Prize. Today we bring you Terrell Jamal Terry, author of the poetry collection Eyeless Light Seeing, which will be published in the fall of 2019. This will be Terrell’s second book with Black Lawrence Press.
Have a manuscript you think we’d like? During our November Open Reading Period we are looking for poetry (chapbooks and full-length collections), short fiction (again, both chapbooks and full-length collections), novels, novellas, nonfiction (CNF, biography, cultural studies) and translations from German. Also, our Big Moose Prize for the novel is currently open to early bird submissions.
 

The Author

Terrell Jamal Terry is the author of the poetry collections Aroma Truce (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and Eyeless Light Seeing (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming, 2019). In 2018, a limited-edition chapbook will be published by The Song Cave. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, West Branch, The Journal, Green Mountains Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, Crab Orchard Review, The Volta, Sugar House Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Diode, Washington Square Review, the anthology Bettering American Poetry 2015, and elsewhere.

 
 

On writing Eyeless Light Seeing

Eyeless Light Seeing was created from a rib in my debut poetry collection Aroma Truce, so to speak. Several poems were being made with a loose urgency. They flowed in and out of each other. Patterns were with and without obvious meaning. I allowed lines and phrases to breathe for days and weeks. I was writing into what could be. My process is usually initiated by any number of everyday happenings that suddenly transform into little quixotic revelations­. All of my poems to this point have been abstractly personal, but not necessarily autobiographical. My process is usually something like this: brainstorming or stacking images, lines and thoughts (sometimes playful and always highly expressive), linking (searching for themes and connections), drafting, composition, revision and editing. The ideas and implications in this second book continue to point to my curiosity and often confusion about identity, experience and observation. Isolation, social class, addiction, beauty and grace, are some of the themes that are sporadically sprinkled across the collection. I began creating poems for this book while living in Raleigh, NC. The book was completed in Pittsburgh, about two years later. Unlike my debut, I divided the collection into sections. My intention being to permit the reader to absorb the book slowly.
 
 

Excerpts

 
 
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