Starfish Blues

Rasheena Fountain's sweeping memoir centers on stories of Black migration, exploration, and relationships to nature and place. Through a series of letters, poems, and essays that take blues-inspired leaps across time, she reflects on the movements of her ancestors and on her own journeys: from Chicago to Seattle, from city life to nature conservation, and from silence into songwriting. In Starfish Blues, Fountain seeks something "much bigger than representation": a recouping of ancestral visions of freedom for herself and her daughter, and a life that has room for her queerness, her womanhood, her Blackness, her full self.