MISEDUCATION - Aerik Francis’s second chapbook, out May 2023 with New Delta Review

Winner of the New Delta Review 2022 chapbook contest

Finalist for the Tupelo Press 2022 chapbook contest

"'This is the future' is what I kept saying to myself while reading Aerik Francis’ MISEDUCATION. This is a radical contemporary love letter to the queer BIPOC lineage that reminds us of the importance of community, the expansiveness of family, and of course, the power of both resilience and resistance in taking back what is rightfully ours. Francis’ speaker carries the greatest internal strength through this high confrontation and abolition of irrelevant canonical standards, such as 'objective beauty.' I’ve been waiting for this collection. I’m in awe of what Francis does to language, through its decolonization, as well as its infinite innovation. Through textures and hybridity, their voice has simultaneously redefined what a collection can do, while paying homage to the critical voices who came before them. Francis is an artist who will keep pushing poetry anew—there are absolutely no limitations—this is an important book."

—final judge Dorothy Chan, author of BABE (Diode Editions, 2021)

"[I]t was not until miseducation, Aerik Francis’s second chapbook, that I found this critique [of the academe] taken up in poetry. With a keen combination of intellect and heart, Francis deploys the tools of poetry–juxtaposition, sonic-sense, metaphor, space on the page–to paint a Kafka-esque world where pain surges through the current of words. At its best, Francis’s poetry, even when probing betrayal and dysfunction, is musical, playful, and makes strong use of structure."

—Review in RHINO Poetry by Emily Pérez

MISEDUCATION is Francis’s second poetry chapbook and the winner of the New Delta Review 2022 Chapbook Contest. This central thesis of this project can be summarized in a paraphrasing of a famous quotation from writer Mark Twain: Never let schooling interfere with education. Denouncing rampant academic abuse, this experimental collection of poetry explores the forms and erasures of academia for people who, too, have had a harsh and complicated history with school and education. The title MISEDUCATION is a nod to the text The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter Woodson, and musician Lauryn Hill’s album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Cover art designed by multimedia artist Ophelia Arc.

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BODYELECTRONIC - Aerik Francis’s debut chapbook, out April 20, 2022 with Trouble Department

Finalist for 2021 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize Texas Review Press

"BODYELECTRONIC is an innovative dance with feelings and systems. Francis has written a smart and tender voice within a branded, electronic world: “am iAfraid?” This collection is visually interesting and thematically challenging, with formal and linguistic play that explores the sensory and sensual confusion of everyday life. These poems live in the actions which we double across our blurring virtual and physical realms: emptying the trash, opening a window, holding a dead mouse. Francis is a poet with keen observation and a big heart. “iRemember us like a queer holiday,” they write. BODYELECTRONIC is a book of the constantly shifting, complex portals between the realms in which we live and long to connect."

—Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Advantages of Being Evergreen

"Through BODYELECTRONIC, the body becomes digitized, the digital becomes embodied, the accumulation of our many selves laid bare on the screen– and on the page… Playfully poignant, Francis’s poems read like code, like digital spellwork, once again revealing the messy overlaps between the corporeal and the artificial life giving gigabytes that drive connection forward … BODYELECTRONIC is one of those books the reader must return to time and time again. It is self reflective, emotive, complex. New meaning is articulated upon each read. Each poem title is a file, part of a rich archive of being that we are blessed to bear witness to their unearthing."

—Review in The Winnow Magazine by Ashia Ajani

"Francis’s BODYELECTRONIC so beautifully troubles and complicates the body’s relationship with other bodies and other devices. The lyric speaker and the lyric image are not merely forms of resistance to larger repetitive systems. These poems refute such binaries and refuse an equation with poems on one side and systems on another. Poems and systems are fused. They, like our bodies, are enmeshed together, inseparable both in oppression and in holiness. That’s precisely what makes these poems so exciting and thought-provoking. Aerik Francis challenges us in witty and devastating ways to consider how we, like poetry and our bodies, are already joined with the digital and electronic, much as Franny Choi does in Soft Science. As in the title, language shows the way there is no gap between the two– and also, simultaneously, finds all the space inside of the words to complicate that language."

—Review in Prairie Schooner by Kelly Weber

"A manically witty mapping of the intersections between digital life and the messiness of bodily existence, BODYELECTRONIC presents the kind of poetry reading experience that leaves the brain overclocked in the best possible way. Each of the chapbook’s 18 pieces will be worth coming back to again and again to feel out their many bends and subroutines. We feel like this will probably be timely subject matter for our cultural moment, but in these times a lot can happen in six months, so who knows? At least in the case of this chapbook, the uncertainty is part of the fun."

—Trouble Department description

BODYELECTRONIC is Francis’s debut poetry chapbook, forthcoming in late April of 2022 by small Colorado press, Trouble Department. In this compact collection of poems, lived experiences become embodied with technology, and the body itself becomes digitized. Every time there is an imagined physical realm, a politicized digitality coalesces among the possibilities, and vis-versa in their mutual composition. These poems are interested in the sensual intimacies of technologic relationships and their political and poetic consequences.

Expanded BODYELECTRONIC projects:

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