Talk
by Carl Hancock Rux

In the age of McCarthy and the Beat poets, a controversial African-American artist, Archer Aymes, became an overnight sensation for his first book, Mother and Son.

Ten years later he was found dead in a prison cell.

Decades later, a conference is formed and a panel comes together to debate the facts and importance of Aymes’s life.

Through Rux’s vivid imagery, and meticulous research, his crackling dialogue and poetically constructed debate, we become participants at the conference, and listen very closely, achingly, as Rux scrutinizes the way we record history, skewers our reverence toward celebrity and academic authority, and dismantles our confidence in our own memory.