Aqueous (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780889844759)

Aqueous by Nathanael Jones is a collection of prose poems that address the ways in which post-colonial realities in the black diaspora continue to fracture concepts of identity, history and memory, place, and community. Through the use of extended metaphors relating to the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary art, marine biology, and the commercial construction industry, both personal and collective experiences of being Afro-Caribbean Canadian in North America/Turtle Island are described and enacted as indefinitely liminal. Organized into three main poem sequences, the collection first uses a fictional sound art piece as a way of diagramming the kinds of fractured subjectivities engendered by colonialism and its after effects. In the second sequence, a beleaguered speaker navigates realities of manual labour and how they are used to shape racialized and gendered identities, and the pressures these forces exert upon interpersonal relationships. Lastly, the third sequence delves further into oceanographic themes in order to compose a portrait of Montreal's black anglophone communities as both invisible and yet forever in the peripherals of mainstream cultures in Canada.