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Osa Atoe

shotgunseamstress@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Author of Shotgun Seamstress: The Complete Zine Collection, a compilation of punk rock fanzines created between 2006 and 2015 covering the experiences of Black punk rockers, artists, LGBTQ, feminists and activists.

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Osa Atoe's books

Currently Reading (View all 5)

Jade Angeles Fitton: Hermit (Hardcover, Hutchinson Heinemann) No rating

I never imagined that the wind would blow me here, to a kind of isolation …

“It was towards the end of our time at the house that I recognised that my experience of loneliness is relieved when I am alone; there is symmetry in it. I thought countless times in the intervening years that it must be nice to finally stop trying to belong, to walk away from it all, from them all. I thought that, rather than missing out, there must be something to gain from leaving so much behind. When someone takes things from us that we don’t really need to survive, if we look at it another way, they are relieving us of a burden.”

Hermit by  (Page 38)

Tricia Hersey: We Will Rest! (2024, Little Brown & Company) No rating

This is an art book, filled with poetry, drawings, instructional exercises and personal testimony. You can read it in one sitting, but, like her other book, it works best as a guide that you revisit over a long period of time. Personally, I find her first book Rest as Resistance to be more helpful in understanding the foundations of this movement, the call to rest. I think this book makes an artful follow-up to the first book, showing how important creativity, imagination and playfulness are to understanding and embodying her theories.

Tricia Hersey: Rest Is Resistance (Hardcover, 2022, Octopus Publishing Group) 5 stars

Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by …

This is not a book to read once, set aside and move to the next thing. This is one to keep by your bedside and re-read until the lessons within become second nature. This may take years, possibly a lifetime. This is deep reprogramming work. Diving into Hersey's alternate reality will make you question what is and reimagine what is possible. Black liberationist, womanist, anti-capitalist wisdom for the ages.

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Kathleen Hanna: Rebel Girl (EBook, 2024, HarperCollins Publishers) 5 stars

I want to tell you how I write songs and produce music. How singing makes me feel connected to a million miracles at once. How being onstage is the one place I feel the most me. But I can't untangle all of that from the background that is male violence.

I wish I could forget the guy who stalked me while I was making my solo record. How he sat on the roof of the building across from mine and looked Into my windows with binoculars as I worked. How he told my neighbors he thought I was a prostitute who "needed to be stopped." I wish I could slice him out of my story as a musician, but I can't.

I also don't want this book to be a list of traumas, so I'm leaving a lot of that on the cutting room floor. It's more important to remember that I've seen ugly basement rooms transform into warm campfires, dank rock-bro clubs become bright parties where girls and gay kids and misfits danced together in a sea of freedom and joy, art galleries that had only ever showcased white male mediocrity become sites of thrilling feminist collaborations. I also ate gelato on a street in Milan with my bandmates and cried because it tasted THAT FUCKING GOOD.

But yeah, there were also rapes and run-ins with assholes who threw water on my shine. I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren't. I want them to be stories because stories are made up of words, and words can't hurt me. But the things I'm writing about aren't stories, they're my blood. They're the things that shaped me. The things that keep me up at night rechecking the locks on the doors. The things that make me afraid and ashamed. The things that inspire me to keep going.

I don't feel much like a "rebel girl"-most of the time I feel more like a dirty napkin. But Dirty Napkin is a terrible title for a book. It's also not who I am.

Rebel Girl by  (Page 1)

Masaru Emoto: The Hidden Messages in Water (Paperback, 2005, Atria) 4 stars

Using high-speed photography, Dr. Masaru Emoto demonstrates that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes …

Feel-good pseudoscience

3 stars

Reading this book as a perspective on spirituality and environmentalism is probably more important than reading it for scientifically proven facts. It's clear that Emoto's research findings are colored with subjectivity. For instance, claims that water exposed to classical music create more beautiful crystals than water exposed to heavy metal betray the author's own biases. However, none of this takes away from the spiritual messaging of this book, which perfectly coincides with so many other spiritual doctrines: that consciousness creates reality, that love and gratitude are the most essential and revolutionary spiritual values.

Emoto is basically using his research on water crystallization as the standpoint from which to draw spiritual realizations, which mirror universal spiritual tenets. It's a quick and beautiful read and his photos of water crystals are fascinating and exquisite. The strength of this book is that it ties spiritual beliefs to something tangible and ubiquitous. Also, the …