perennial fashion presence falling

perennial fashion presence falling collects written versions of Fred Moten’s various songs of collaboration from recent years. In keeping with his social and political solidarities and his longstanding ethic of sharing around art and theory, the collection refuses one “you” or “they,” instead serving as a roster of contributions to and interactions with others’ practices. Poems adapt text from several exhibition catalogs, including for Carrie Mae Weems, Kevin Beasley, and Milford Graves (“graves say, grave says”). Moten also renews lyrics from Moten/López/Cleaver, his album with Brandon ​López​ and Gerald Cleaver, whose opening track invokes, among others, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Sylvia Wynter, and Ruth Gilmore:

art don’t work
for abolition.
art works for
bosses, like you
and me. if “let’s
abolish art” sounds
too close to “let’s
abolish you and
me,” it’s ’cause it
is. I love art and
I love you, too,
and this is a love
song, so it’s got
to be too close.

In “color field,” Moten critiques institutional spaces that exhibit visual art, how “black / arts vs. black abstraction / is a lie again and again,” when “somebody black and poor can’t breathe” on the street and

[…] all of us
all fucked up with our
phantom child, and
you get to act like you
alive in a brutal gallery?

Interior museum space with black art on display is contrasted with the black life lived and policed outside of it in another poem, “approaching,” in which “the fucking / muck” black artists

be musing on for our lives and their
muhfuckin’ amusement, here, at this beautiful
museum. take some more black lives for us to
muse on for your fucking amusement, muhhh
fucka.

The commodification of black art and culture can result in an economy of death—“the new black art is this: find the self and make a killing.” Countering such representation and performance, Moten insists: “we really don’t respond to these / motherfuckers. the discipline is our imagination.” Across sculpture, paint, numbers, etymology, drums, and dreams, Moten’s latest book is a reminder that the extraordinary poet, teacher, and critic writes always in multiplicities of genre, dimension, and meaning.