{books}
AT SEA (CLASH BOOKS)
“AT SEA is a collection that — at times introspective and confessional, at times perceptively aimed outward, toward a vertiginous world — sails the pathway between trauma and healing. Readers are taken aboard into a microcosm where wonder meets waterlogged torment and self-harm; where grief, euphoria and longing coexist; where womanhood is as joyful and dizzying an experience as it is searing; where peeling the layers of cultural identity is like plunging into the most opaque and briny deep. While the act of remembering has solitary, melancholy tinges, Aïcha Martine Thiam’s pen never wavers, nor does it stray far from the impulse to bear witness, to do justice, and to connect with kindred souls.”
September 2021
Cover art by Joel Amat Güell
BURN THE WITCH (FINISHING LINE PRESS)
Aïcha Martine Thiam’s Burn the Witch is a book-length magic show with a host who knows her tricks. […] And even in her vulnerable moments, even when the pain becomes too much, Thiam’s speaker casts another spell, says “I am a woman who can hold it together hold it together / hold it together” until the reader is mouthing along, until we say it enough to believe it.
–Taylor Byas, Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, and author of BLOODWARM and I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
Aïcha Martine Thiam’s Burn the Witch is an incantation, a furtive glance, a maximalist reframing of a speaker that defies limitations. Like all strong witches, […] She’ll swallow cyclones, she’ll magic a little world that shuns. Watch yourself, reader. Do not undervalue what plants in these deep, solitary woods. In this brilliant book, Thiam constructs “a Universe unto herself” amid the constant threat of disappearance, of “conditional bullet talk,” of the violence of everyday life as a Black woman. If you know what’s good for you, you’d better start listening.
—Jessica Q. Stark, Poetry Editor for AGNI, Comics Editor for Honey Literary and author of INNANET, Savage Pageant and Buffalo Girl and more
Cover art by Elin Creese
September 2022