speculation, n.

speculation, n. by Shayla Lawz won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and imagines a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death. Shayla Lawz’s debut collection brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems