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Light blue book cover, with a metallic purple title that reads "a rock, a river, a street" in lowercase. Each word is stacked on top of the other. The author's name, Steffani Jemison, sits below the title in all capital letters.

Client

Primary Information

Year

2022

Location

New York, NY

Press

The Brooklyn Rail

Steffani Jemison
A Rock, A River, A Stone

Jemison moves deftly across narrative genres and styles as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality, and the limits of performance. Titled after Maya Angelou's poem "On the Pulse of Morning," the book is punctuated by gestural drawings that point to questions of repetition and difference.⁠⁠

Where does your body end and the world begin? How do you locate the limit between yourself and others? A Rock, A River, A Street follows a young Black woman who lives at the hazy border between Brooklyn and Queens in the not-so-distant present. As she rides the subway, walks around her neighborhood, visits the doctor, watches movies, attends dance class, and tries to heal her body, she recalls formative experiences from her childhood and absorbs the world around her; in the process, we are brought into her conflicted relationship with language. Acutely conscious of the soft, responsive nature of her physical self, and pushed and pulled by forces she cannot control, the narrator is vulnerable, terrifyingly open. Everything and everyone leaves an impression.⁠

Published by Primary Information, Designed by Pacific, Softcover, 5 × 7¼ inches, 154 pages, Edition of 2,000

Light blue book cover, with a metallic purple title that reads "a rock, a river, a street" in lowercase. Each word is stacked on top of the other. The author's name, Steffani Jemison, sits below the title in all capital letters.
An open book with a vertical ink stain running from the top to the bottom of the left page. Two ink dots sit just to the right of the line. Text fills the bottom two-thirds of the right page.
Open book with text on both pages.
Light blue back cover of a book. Purple text runs along the top two-thirds of the cover. A barcode and the publisher's name, Primary Information, sit at the bottom.

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