Anna Rabinowitz Award

JJJJJerome Ellis on the chapbook wordtomydead and installation work from the 2024 Whitney Independent Study Program Studio Exhibition, At Odds With

I witness sadé powell’s wordtomydead with awe. This transdisciplinary project—which spans chapbook and installation—inspires me with its hospitality to many modes of reading. Sometimes I move through the chapbook linearly, dwelling with lines like “what am i unbecoming?” Or I go soft-focus, swimming through its rivers and reefs of words. Or I run my fingers over its gray pages as I might a shard of metamorphic rock, reading the transformations wrought by powell and her 1940s mechanical typewriter. The poems flow between the chapbook and the installation, with its handmade, beeswax-coated sheets of paper sewn together and draped from windows. Each page glows.

In its kinetic precision, wordtomydead calls out not just to be read, but to be danced with! For me it’s a touchstone of what historian Saidiya Hartman calls “the opacity of black song.” powell continues and reinvents black ways of cultivating opacity, refusing certain forms of legibility to pursue liberation on other terms. She’s described encountering certain limits to political legibility in her work as an advocate and organizer, and how these limits have informed the linguistic illegibilities on display here. Under the sign of powell’s poetics, illegibility continues to be a tool for political imagination. But she goes further. She offers a practice beyond, or maybe free from, the possible binary of legible/illegible. As she says in an interview: “I think that legibility is not enough, and maybe illegibility isn’t either.” In the space opened by that maybe, she offers her invitation to keep playing with, fighting for, studying, practicing, debating, and questioning freedom. Or, as she writes, “freeform / freefrom / formfree / reefmorf.”

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sadé powell is a concrete poet from New York City, exploring performative writing through experimental print and paper techniques. She is the author of dontbeabitterbtch (selva oscura press), wordtomydead (Ugly Duckling Presse), and periodluv (Belladonna*), and a 2025 Jerome Foundation Fellow. Her work has been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Poetry Project, Center for Book Arts, and the Whitney Independent Study Program, among others. powell’s practice centers the sonic, kinesthetic, and linguistic elements of her 1930s Royal typewriter to deploy dissemblance as black feminist poethics.