"Black Purity” came from an interest in exploring the Black body as spectacle, how even (especially?) in moments of extreme hate and violence, there’s this weird reverent obsession with our bodies. Like, it was regular practice for toes or bones or organs to be taken as souvenirs from lynchings; it’s almost religious, like some fucked-up type of worship. I want to claim that holiness on my own terms.
“A child of the desert, I’ll always be soothed by lakes and rivers; abundance where there once was scarcity. The lake I am describing in “Lake Nicol, Late Summer” feels so integral to the complicated memory I have of Tuscaloosa. I left because I saw the University and its MFA as unsurvivable, but there were also places (like this lake) that enchanted me in ways that border the magical, ways I still can’t find the words to fully express."
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. Their most recent work appears or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Witness, Adroit, Pigeon Pages, and Icarus. You can also find them on Twitter and Instagram.
