Grievers

Description

Grievers Trilogy #1

By adrienne maree brown
AK Press

Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

“Dune finds her way into our inner spaces as we read Grievers by adrienne maree brown. We are compelled to witness this precise yet unwieldy unfolding spiral of memory and resistance via survival. Grievers is the right book for right now. adrienne inspires us to be present as we try and put ourselves back together no matter how broken this world seems. There has never been a love letter to Detroit and social justice lineages like this one.”—Ayana A. H. Jamieson, PhD, founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network

With this series, which honors anarchist traditions and follows the great Octavia E. Butler’s legacy, Black Dawn seeks to explore themes that do not reinforce dependency on oppressive forces (the state, police, capitalism, elected officials) and will generally express the values of antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, and anticapitalism. With its natural creation of alternate universes and world-building, speculative fiction acts as a perfect tool for imagining how to bring forth a just and free world. The stories published by Black Dawn center queerness, Blackness, antifascism, and celebrate voices previously disenfranchised, all who are essential in establishing a society in which no one is oppressed or exploited.