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.
