Overview

Starfish Blues is an experimental memoir of a Black queer woman's journey to find a version of home through tracing her family's migrations, reimagining environmental activism, and redefining her relationship to nature and place. Through a series of letters, poems, and nonlinear riffs through memory, Rasheena Fountain reflects on both the gifts and wounds of her formative experiences, including her childhood move from central Illinois back to Chicago's West Side; her daily life as a single parent; and her migration to Seattle to work in nature conservation, a field rife with discrimination, tokenism, and safety issues for BIPOC environmentalists and recreationists. Throughout, music is a restorative balm as well as a formal influence on Fountain's writing, which takes exuberant thematic and temporal leaps inspired by blues, gospel, and house music. Fountain examines her parents' and grandparents' stories and celebrates her family's history of movement, from the Great Migration to the legacy of Black explorers. In doing so, she reckons with broader systems of colonization and Indigenous erasure, as well as the insidious effects of enslavement, environmental degradation, police brutality, patriarchy, and homophobia. In this bold and lyrical debut, Fountain strives to transcend expectations of her sexuality and womanhood while seeking new ways to embrace her full self. Through healing the past and challenging the narratives that try to limit her, she searches for better versions of Black freedom. Intimate, insightful, and brimming with hope, Starfish Blues expands the possibilities of both memoir and nature writing, inspiring us to consider our own relationship to the places that have shaped us.

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9781634050661

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Reviews

"""All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,"" writes Toni Morrison. Starfish Blues by Rasheena Fountain is a deep blue memoir written in the Black tradition of return. Shaped by the lands and waters of the Salish Sea, Mississippi, Chicago, and all that flows around and connects in between, Starfish Blues invites us to witness movement and is itself a witnessing. Our invitation to witness extends the possibility becoming ritual, rememory, and refrain. This refrain, steeped in the questions and answers of the blues, riffs on home. It is a book of relations in conversation with the living and dead, human and more than human, Black Spaces, Indigenous lands, past, present, and possible futures. It is a question of genre - poetry, prose, photographs - queer-mixing our lives. It is a love song to all Fountain's addresses in the book, but especially to Faith, Fountain's daughter, whose presence shines like the lightning bugs Fountain recalls briefly when returning to Mississippi one summer after the death of her great grandmother. However fraught our memories and imaginings must be, Starfish Blues sings us home. -Rae Paris, author of The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory Starfish Blues is a vivid voyage through nature's provision set to a beautiful blues ballad of familial love. This brilliant epic of triumph brings laughter, nostalgia, and the warmth of a grandmother's embrace. -Caprice Banks, author of Little Girl, Grown"

Author Information

Rasheena Fountain is a poet and essayist whose work focuses on Black environmental memory. Her work has been published in HuffPost, Mountaineer Magazine, ZORA, and elsewhere. She has an MAEd in Urban Environmental Education from Antioch University Seattle in partnership with IslandWood and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where she is currently a PhD student in English Literature and Culture. Originally from Chicago's West Side, she now lives in Seattle.

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