Poet Rio Cortez on 'Afropioneerism' and Black settlers out west

Sounds like an interesting one to check out shipmate PO1 William "Chip" Nagel

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."SN: You write that one of the questions that obsessed you was “how does a story begin?” Can you talk about the importance of questions and questioning in this collection, and how it kind of comes full circle and moves into the unknown at the end?

RC: I think everyone naturally is obsessed with the question of how did this begin? How did I begin? Whether that’s you specifically, or your family, or “you” as life on Earth as an organism that just lives and exists. But I’m specifically thinking of it in the arc of the Black American experience. There is no beginning. I started off with really trying literally to answer those questions. I did a lot of research, I hired a genealogist, I tried my best to get to the beginning of us. It was just impossible. And I have an unusual amount of historical records of my family, but it was impossible. But I think the reckoning that comes through these poems for me was that there are so many questions that don’t really need to be answered; they can be answered in so many different ways. There’s not going to be an answer for me about how we got here and who we were before my third great-grandparents. I’m not going to have an answer to that question; I know that through the process of writing this book. But I did come to know and was comforted by so many other things. And there is knowledge — there is a knowing about where you come from that exists in this intangible, beautiful liminal space."