Aster of Ceremonies asks what rites we need now and how poetry, astir in the asters, can help them along. What is the relationship between fleeing and feeling? How can the voices of those who came before—and the stutters that leaven those voices—carry into our present moment, mingling with our own? When Ellis writes, "Bring me the stolen will / Bring me the stolen well," his voice is a conduit, his "me" is many. Through the grateful invocations of ancestors, Hannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and others, and their songs, he rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom.

A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—JJJJJerome Ellis's Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, The Clearing, a "lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech" (Claudia Rankine).

JJJJJerome Ellis is the author of Aster of Ceremonies. He is an animal, stutterer, and artist. He is also the author and composer of The Clearing, an audio-textual project that investigates how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. His work has been presented by the Lincoln Center, the Poetry Project, MASS MoCA, REDCAT, Arraymusic, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, among others. He lives in Tidewater, Virginia, where he was raised by Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants.

JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing asks how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation. Stemming from Ellis's essay "The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Volume 5, Issue 2) the present volume transcribes and translates his investigation across genres and media, turning to the page to ask: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body? Can a book be not just a manuscript, but a glottoscript? Ellis opens space for thinking liberation theoretically, historically, and lyrically.

"The Clearing is many things: a lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech; a restless interrogation of linear time; an intimate portrait of the author’s real-time experience of his stutter; a baptism in syllable and sound; and a manuscript illuminated by The Stutter. At its core, Ellis’ metaphor of the clearing becomes a place of possibility and “momentary, transitory, glimpsed liberation.” He invites us to meet him there."—Claudia Rankine