Candace Hill, Muss Sill

Candace Hill, Muss Sill

I hear you’s ! Scolding non-being
next to her singing or reaching for a better way
you say purse i say
skirt
tell the truth!
('Observationally they be shoutin'')

In the 32 poems of Muss Sill, Candace Hill stays true to the mess of talk and text. Signals come in from all channels, scrambled and subverted, travestied and challenged. If it’s ‘time for some modernism’, strap in. ‘Slip up on a Motown riffty kinda day’? Stay nimble. The references are generous, scalar shifts that ricochet. The rhymes and puns are footholds and booby traps that can support you or send you flying. It’s the everyday vertiginous and it's a long way down.  ‘People hate puzzling things’ she writes. These are poems of the last few years, written with catastrophe on every side. Hill isn’t witness, exactly: that’s too passive. She’s a poet who listens to the chora of contemporary violence and doesn’t turn away from the noise.

Softcover
67 pages
Dimensions: 250 x 190mm

About the artist

Candace Hill-Montgomery makes art, sometimes with words. Born in 1945, she grew up in Queens, before moving to Harlem and teaching at the Martin Luther King High School in Manhattan. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, she regularly exhibited her paintings and made installation and performance works. Her publications include Fire Escape Scrolls (1982), Evening Tomorrow's Here Today Since the Hornet Flies I Triangle (1983), Muss Sill (2020), and the long poem Short Leash Kept On (2022). In recent years she has exhibited weavings at Blank Forms (NYC), Hollybush Gardens (London) and White Columns (NYC). She lives on Long Island.