Reasons for Smoking

This chapbook by Xandria Phillips was chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of The Seattle Review 2016 poetry chapbook contest. About Reasons for Smoking, Rankine has said, "This work positions snapshots of contemporary black, queer selfhood against an embodied historical backdrop in order to trace the tolls and infringements of white dominant structures and embedded historical violence upon the body. When I read it, I am reminded of the ways in which language can be repurposed as an amplification device against narratives that seek to erase, bury, and diminish. The poems in Reasons for Smoking articulate how living, touching, noticing, speaking, and remembering are necessary and subversive acts."