Village
Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement.
In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of "survivor," getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.
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Become an affiliateA writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center and at festivals including: Explore the North Festival, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; Hekayeh Festival, Abu Dhabi; International Poetry Festival of Copenhagen; Ocean Space, Venice; International Poetry Festival of Romania; Question of Will, Slovakia; Poesiefestival, Berlin; and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium. Diggs has received a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Whiting Award (2016) and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She lives in Harlem and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College and Stetson University.
Praise for Village:
"Diggs has found ways to sing out through hardship. . . . This is a dazzling and impressive work." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
"The macaronic poems in Village . . . revel in cacophonous cascades of raucous soundplay and the visual arrangement of linguistic fragments from over a half-dozen languages--primarily Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Portuguese, but also German, Latin, Arabic, Quechua, Diné, and Yoruba--which litter the page in crisscrossing zig-zags and rigid squares, like city blocks. . . . Unconventional choices add to the originality of Diggs's composition, which borrows from public and visual arts in exciting ways." --Diego Báez, Poetry Foundation
"Part instruction manual, part celebration, part dance party, part garden tour, Village refuses compartmentalization, demanding engaged and engaging ways of looking at and talking about difficult shared experiences. . . . In English, Portuguese, Tsalagi, Māori, Arabic, Yoruba, and more. These poems by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs reveal the richly diverse ecosystem of what a limited imagination might sideline as a 'marginalized' life." --Camille Dungy, Orion Magazine
"LaTasha out here singing in tongues again, and I gotta sing her praises. This Village is a family history, a biomythography, a sensory tsunami: a documentary poetics composed in the languages Diggs needed to get at her truth, all of them getting stretched, chopped, spat, crooned, and retuned to a lower frequency. Hard, tender, witty, and elegiac, these fully populated poems are portraits of the human condition--and the conditions that shape and haunt some humans more than others." --Evie Shockley
"Buzzing with song-sound, poetic music, multiple languages, mad word love, intergenerational multiplicities of wisdom and harm, constant rearrangement of and searching for formal expansion that can channel all of it into shapes that keep moving, all these lives on the line, proposals and testimony and lists and saved documents--Village is a vast, searing, funny, and ultimately incredible book." --Anselm Berrigan
"In Diggs's hands, under her bone plectrum, which seems plucked from the Milky Way at night, sound becomes pliant, extensive, ecstatic, specific, omnilinguistic, sluicing, and moody. Sound reveals and conceals its faces, calls for and sends away its devotees, entails a velvety fabric that can be seamed, stitched, furled, unfurled, burnt till it converts to sight and smell, melts, wicks out. Scatters. Swerves to the verge. The term virtuosic seems too mean and stingy for the magnitude of Diggs's star." --Joyelle McSweeney
Praise for LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs:
"I want to write nearby. . . . LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, who recombines Black slang, Japanese, Spanish, Chamorro, and Tagalog into a remastered Afrofuturist song." --Cathy Park Hong
"More poets are dissecting the personal and shared experience of a post-global United States battered from decades of war and polarizing politics, contesting the offhand and sometimes facile liberal humanism in poems meant to address racial difference. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs's TwERK is a multilingual performance of linguistic personae." --Carmen Giménez Smith, Boston Review
"Diggs is a language connoisseur. . . . [She] navigates Standard English and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) with ease, weaving Japanese, Cherokee, and Quechua into her wo