The first monograph by sculptor, filmmaker, and photographer Shikeith, Notes towards Becoming a Spill brings together a series of striking studio portraits of Black male subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. Shikeith describes the work as "leaning into the uncanny," visualizing ritual and the process of excavating Black men's erotic potential, the better to exorcise the "intangible presences that haunt their bodies and psyches." The men's faces and bodies glisten with sweat (and tears)-the manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as "an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world." In this revelatory volume, Shikeith redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a Queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy. Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous contribution of 7G Foundation.

In The Lonely Letters, A tells Moth: "Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding." But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley-writing as A-meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world.

In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or “otherwise” modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalism—a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los Angeles—Blackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. As Crawley deftly reveals, these choreographic, sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for imagining what Crawley identifies as “otherwise worlds of possibility,” they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture in an era when such expressions are increasingly under siege.