Nightnursing
Resisting the conventional narratives of care and cure, Tiana Reid’s Nightnursing is a frenetic diary about sobriety and what recovery really means in a world where the innate need for “better” is both trauma and treatment. The poems in this nuanced collection delve into the terrible beauty of unbaked work, critical practice, and state-sanctioned care.
Nightnursing simultaneously runs toward and away from reality, grappling with the gravity of memory, of remembering, of a “mind constantly rewriting what happened.” The poems of this collection are experimental and playful in their depth as they drift through the haze of time, pressing fists to the boundaries of language and the self.
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Nightnursing inventories the racialization of care, cure, and memory with erudite flair and paratactic presence. In these poems, the past is not only remembered, it is the present. “Had to blow up the idea that everything would be fine,” Reid writes, then expands the frame to make space for an infinite us. In the face of recovery discourses’ “spectacular violence,” what a “kind of lightning” it is to be electrified and unraveled by this work. — Jody Chan, author of Impact Statement
Nightnursing — a state of wailing with Gregory from the truth of the baseline of all riddims, of all life: only she, the mother of the self, can quench this thirst. The mother — Reid — beckons the call, like music, of repetition: she uses it to redirect the pace of her poems, she uses it to refocus, she uses it to thicken the point, the plot, the plan. This collection gives honesty to the being that is in charge of the self and the controls of the self that memory and substance can take hold of. Reid either asks the questions of existence or speaks to existence, both without hesitation. This is a generous and beautiful book of poetry that challenges the rhythm of the voice and the space of a page. May this collection sit amongst us beyond our time. — Rhea Dillon, artist, writer, and poet
The poems in Tiana Reid’s self-confronting debut speak through a bitten tongue — through origin, loss, coping, care, cure, and anti-cure — about the fugitive possibilities of life in grief ’s looping, inescapable presence. Betraying the limits of self-medication and recovery, Nightnursing tends to the buried summaries “emerging/from morning sun” to persist in and with the impossible world. “What/love/from/the/level/of an/other”: Nightnursing is transformational medicine for capacious life lived in the open. — Ari Banias, author of A Symmetry
“I fail to organize contradiction. I want to mourn myself.” As if circling a drain, the hypervigilant intellect of Tiana Reid’s Nightnursing refuses to swallow itself, to move on. With richly sensorial poems that reject solution and trouble the institutionalization of care, we are delivered into a fragmented memory where grief, having transmuted itself to mimic desire, reveals the fantasy of recovery as a point of conclusion. Nightnursing feeds its reader on repetition — the repetition of need, of addiction, of phrase, of failure, of history and the violence it inflicts, of the child hovering in the doorway of it all, stuck. I did not leave this book in ease. I wept reading Reid’s text, heartbroken and thankful to have found a voice and a poet committed to the kind of honesty I have been exhaustively hiding from within myself. — Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, author of Dereliction
Tiana Reid’s writing has been published in Aperture, Bookforum, Dissent, Frieze, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Poets.org, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is also Assistant Professor of English at York University in Toronto, where she teaches Black literatures. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She also co-edits the magazine Pinko.
