Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive is an interrogation of the archive—its forms, failures, and alternative frequencies—featuring contributions from Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, and others.
The editor, Naima Yael Tokunow—Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow—comes to the project having had to reckon with the Black American Record while researching her own familial history. What she found was an absence of “legitimate” records, though an abundance of those considered “illegitimate”—a distinction she troubles to ask, “How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record?”
The answers abound. In our conversation below we discuss the archive, its discontents, and the anthology—which allows the past to interrupt a seemingly uninterruptible present.
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: Permanent Record works, wonderfully, with and around and against the archive. What shaped your approach to the project?
Naima Yael Tokunow: This project emerged from years of wrestling with the archive as both wound and possibility. As a Black American and a first-generation “israeli” American, my understanding of identity has always been shaped by records—both those that exist and those that have been erased, misremembered, or deliberately destroyed. The archive, in its traditional form, is often weaponized to uphold power, erase resistance, and dictate legitimacy. I wanted Permanent Record to push back against that, to imagine an archive that could be dynamic, porous, abundant, and speculative—one that could hold contradiction, survival, and invention. The book is deeply informed by my personal search for ancestral knowledge, my critical engagement with Black scholarship, and my desire to create a space where poets could reimagine what counts as a record.
Dante Silva: I’m curious about the turn to more imaginative interpretations of the archive, away from those oriented around loss and lack and failure. How do we abandon, if at all, the language of “search and rescue”?
Naima Yael Tokunow: I don’t know that we fully abandon it, but we certainly interrogate it. The dominant language of archival work often frames history as something to be recovered, salvaged, or rescued. But that framing assumes an ultimate knowability—a belief that if we just search hard enough, we will find the “true” record. This book questions that assumption. Instead of simply grieving what is lost, we also ask: What can we build from the fragments? What can we create in the absence of an official record? Many of the works in Permanent Record do not just reclaim what was lost—they invent, reimagine, and insist on the validity of alternative ways of knowing. The archive, then, is not just a site of retrieval but of world-building.
Dante Silva: There’s an abundance of scholarship and poetics here. How did you imagine the different sections? Is there an intended approach for readers?
Naima Yael Tokunow: The book is structured in sections that each engage with the archive in different ways—through language, identity, omission, misdirection, and futurity. Each section begins with a lyric introduction, a kind of map legend, offering a way into the works that follow. But there’s no singular or correct way to engage with the book. Readers can move through it linearly or in a more nonlinear, intuitive way—much like encountering an archive itself. The intention is that the book feels alive, fluid, and interactive, resisting the rigid structure of institutional records.
Dante Silva: What was it like to work on Permanent Record as Nightboat’s Editorial Fellow? What were the highlights of the editorial process? How did you settle on the wonderful and varied list of contributors?
Naima Yael Tokunow: Editing this book as a Nightboat Editorial Fellow was both an honor and a deeply affirming experience. It allowed me to be in conversation with poets and thinkers whose thought partnership has shaped my own understanding of the archive. One of the highlights was witnessing the range of responses to the call—how poets approached the archive through so many different lenses: lineage, language, refusal, rupture, and futurity. The contributors were chosen with an eye toward multiplicity—not just in background and identity, but in aesthetic, approach, and form. The book needed voices that interrogated the archive not only through content but also through structure, fragmentation, and experimentation. It was crucial that the anthology held works that pushed the boundaries of what an archive can be.
Dante Silva: In the section “Future Continuous” you ask, “What can we lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” I love that question, and was reminded of a line from Meena Alexander, “What words stake—sentence and make / believe / A lyric summoning.” There’s a shared, somewhat speculative impulse. What can we lift and summon?
Naima Yael Tokunow: Yes, that line is a call to possibility. If the archive has historically been a site of containment, of loss, of fracture, then what happens when we turn to it as a site of imagination? “Future Continuous” is about what we choose to leave behind—not just as record-keepers, but as ancestors-in-the-making. The speculative impulse in the book is not just about dreaming forward but also about undoing. What records need to be dismantled? What false inheritances need to be unlearned? And, conversely, what can we summon into existence? What can we lift and carry, whole and breathing, for those who come after us?
I love that you bring in Meena Alexander’s line—it speaks so directly to this book’s intention: a summoning, a lyric inscription of what is and what could be.