Firespitter

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A01=Jayne Cortez
activism
activist
anti-racist
art
Author_Jayne Cortez
Black
Black arts movement
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
Cortez
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
historical
History
interdisciplinary
intersectional
Jayne
jazz
music
musicality
performance art
posthumous
surrealism
surrealist
theater
visual arts

Product details

  • ISBN 9781643622323
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 02 Oct 2025
  • Publisher: Nightboat Books
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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A long-awaited, comprehensive collection of renowned poet and performance artist Jayne Cortez’s poetry.

Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez’s practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “her poetry was never ‘protest’ but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”


Jayne Cortez (1934–2012) was an African American poet, performing artist, publisher, and activist who remains widely celebrated for her political, surrealist, and dynamic innovations in language, lyricism, and visceral sound. Taking a stand against discrimination, exploitation, and ecological devastation, Cortez’s work and life probed those issues poetically and politically. As a multifaceted artist, she published a dozen volumes of poetry, including On the Imperial Highway: New and Selected Poems (2008); The Beautiful Book (2007); Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002); Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1997); and Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1982); Poetic Magnetic (1991); Firespitter (1982); Mouth on Paper (1977); Scarifications (1973); and Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares (1969), performed her own poems with music on ten recordings, and was the driving force behind several international conferences that combined her artistic and political concerns.

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