Starfish Blues: A Memoir

Author: Rasheena Fountain

Title: Starfish Blues: A Memoir

Binding: Paperback

Number Of Pages: 204

Release Date: 2026-04-22

Details: Starfish Blues is an experimental memoir of a Black queer woman's journey to find a version of

home through tracing her family's migrations, reimagining environmental activism, and

redefining her relationship to nature and place.



Through a series of letters, poems, and nonlinear riffs through memory and time, Rasheena

Fountain reflects on both the gifts and wounds of her formative experiences, including her

childhood move from central Illinois back to Chicago's West Side; her daily life as a single

parent; and her migration to Seattle to work in nature conservation, a field rife with

discrimination, tokenism, and safety issues for BIPOC environmentalists and recreationists.



Throughout, music is a restorative balm as well as a formal influence on Fountain's writing,

which takes exuberant thematic and temporal leaps inspired by blues, gospel, and house music.

Fountain examines her parents' and grandparents' stories and celebrates her family's history of

movement, from the Great Migration to the legacy of Black explorers. In doing so, she reckons

with broader systems of colonization and Indigenous erasure, as well as the insidious effects of

enslavement, environmental degradation, police brutality, patriarchy, and homophobia.

In this bold and lyrical debut, Fountain strives to transcend expectations of her sexuality and

womanhood while seeking new ways to embrace her full self. Through healing the past and

challenging the narratives that try to limit her, she searches for better versions of Black freedom.

Intimate, insightful, and brimming with hope, Starfish Blues expands the possibilities of both

memoir and nature writing, inspiring us to consider our own relationship to the places that have

shaped us.

EAN: 9798234049803

Languages: English