M. NourbeSe Philip gave a reading on May 12 as a guest of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop (of the Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute at Northwestern) and of the Center for the Writing Arts.  (See http://www.nourbese.com)

Philip read from her 2008 book Zong!, which seeks to discover an adequate way of showing the inadequacy of our ability to write anything as extreme as the history of a slave massacre at sea.  In this work, Philip pursues the disassembly and reassembly of syntactical structures and the use of words as objects. Public radio station WBEZ of Chicago recorded the reading, and it can now be heard at: http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=42193