eat salt | gaze at the ocean
eat salt | gaze at the ocean explores the themes of Black sovereignty, Haitian sovereignty, and Black lives, using the original Haitian zombie as a metaphor for the condition and treatment of Black bodies. Interspersed with textual representations of zombies, Haitian society, and historical policies is the author’s personal narrative of growing up Black and Haitian of immigrant parents on stolen Indigenous Lands. Désil’s aesthetics uses a variety of documents – fictions, newspaper articles, dictionaries, judicial papers – to tease out, exploit, and dismantle the semantics of the zombie. The expression that lends its words and rhythm to the book’s title refers to the reputed “cure” for reversing the process of zombification.
Talonbooks, 2020
What People Are Saying
“Moving through language and lineage, past and present, personal and political, eat salt | gaze at the ocean is an informed, critical, and original work from a bold and exciting voice unafraid to ask hard questions. Désil addresses the reader with grit, reminding white and settler readers this is our history, too. Referring to the hundreds of Black people killed by law enforcement in 2016 alone, she probes, “you might almost want to say this list is not Canada – i dare you.” “come in recede further come in again,” the poet beckons us into our still-present pasts. “how to write about what you carry but don’t know?” This ambitious debut presents a powerful answer to that question.”
— Natasha Sanders-Kay, SubTerrain Magazine
“In eat salt | gaze at the ocean, Junie Désil poses the question we ask ourselves in the diaspora – how to write through here and there through death and life, through invisibility and hypervisibility – and through a popular culture forced upon us as our uninvited avatar. And it’s our tremendous pleasure to read her long and exquisite answer, aesthetically agile and intellectually fierce in its rendering. You eat salt. You gaze at the ocean. You read Junie Désil’s blazing book and become whole in the truth of her song.”
— Wayde Compton, Author of The Outer Harbour and The Blue Road
“There isn’t a pastness, Junie Désil writes, and yet we still need to uncover the paradox for we who are revenants in the present. I read eat salt | gaze at the ocean, or it reads back to me, the histories and presences of Black people in these lands, and I came away infused with a new understanding of how to be here.”
— Juliane Okot Bitek, Author of 100 Days
“After experiencing Junie Désil’s eat salt | gaze at the ocean, I didn’t know what to do with myself but moan/wail the Blackest, deepest lament/ celebration of death, life, and healing. This book is a field where we’re invited to do the work of turning the soil, rooting out, cultivating, and growing. Thank you, Junie, for opening me up and giving me a space to connect with the deep parts of myself and my people.”
— Steven Dunn, Author of Potted Meat and water & power
“In her engulfing debut collection, Junie Désil offers poems that recalibrate my heartbeat. She engages in a fathoming of the inherited— ongoing personal and social— holding each and holding each accountable:
“i write this Black body live / i wish for the kinds of lungs that breathe in salt-heavy hostile seas.”
Through language and forms and imagery that abscond and astound, there is a scope and current in this work that does nothing less than overturn (in the sense of the root of catastrophe) the litany itself.
can we talk about the ocean in the room?
the elephants have left
secrets submerged in brine salt scouring wounds
I say this out loud, within earshot of the coast and without fear of reproach: the ocean will never be the same”.
— Hari Alluri, Author of The Flayed City and The Promise of Rust