City Without Altar - Jasmine Mendez

\n \nCITY WITHOUT ALTAR is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. The titular play in verse that sits at the center of the book seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Between the scenes of the play are interludes that explore a different kind of cutting and what it means to feel othered because of illness, disability and blackness. Ultimately, Machete is a meditation on being/feeling blacked out by the archive, on the world stage and in one's daily life.\n \nPoetry. Drama. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.\n