Shanekia McIntosh's published poetry books explore consumption, memory, and cultural language through experimental form and typographic voice.
A New Sense of Luxury
This collection of poems, written primarily from 2019–2023, is restructured to be read as one long poem. Rather than a group of individual pieces, it explores the fetishization of novelty, questioning how digital consumption shapes storytelling and language and fractures social realities.
It introduces SHANNY typography from public installations into book form, carving out a space to inject personhood and differentiate the "narrator" from the poet. A New Sense of Luxury, a semantic study, takes on multiple narrators, from mimicking ad-copy, spam, and scam bots, emerging internet linguistics as play with the cultural shifts of language and reduction of meaning to further critiques of consumption and isolation.
Published by Eureka! Press April, 2025
111 pages
Cover design: Furqan Jawed
“Shanekia McIntosh’s A New Sense of Luxury is a lyric epic of presence, where being here and now is too often a choice between only “Pleasurescrolling./Doomscrolling.”—thus, not enough and too much at the same time. 21st-century luxury is such a muchness as that, up in imperial prolapse, what’s luxe ain’t nothing if the good feeling doesn’t cost someone some blood. Sometimes, the buyer’s. McIntosh spurns, reels, wants, and winces in a tableau of cramped plentitude and roomy scarcity, taking inventory. This book tells us what’s extra and what’s missing.”
-Douglas Kearney
Spotty Dog Books & Ale (Hudson, NY)
Create Council On The Arts (Catskill, NY)
Topos Too Bookstore (Ridgewood, NY)
Artbook@ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Spiral as Ritual
Spiral began taking form in the fall of 2013. Through multiple readings and performances from 2015-2018, the poems shifted. The chapbook reflects the mania of a trauma response, embodying the "othering" of identity politics with a research and philosophical ethos. These poems have a variety of themes such as Grooming, religion," gentiftifaction, and climate crisis, particularly with interest in climate refugees. As well as the social listening and isolation caused by social media. There are poems written for Rachel Jeanteal and Sandra Bland, as well as from interviews McIntosh conducted with older black women and immigrant Bangladeshi women in the community.
Featuring poetry that was used in performances like Call Me Ishmael (2018), Touched (2017), and Tender Rage (2016).
Published by Topos Press, 2021
Second edition, 2022
41 pages
Cover: “From afar”, Tschabala Self
"Questioning the framework of ailed and failing social architecture, Spiral as Ritual moves with the fury of crashing waves, urgency for air and for answers. Shanekia McIntosh plunges forth, fast-punching and clear in her demand for real and compassionate resolutions—not empty gestures—asking out loud and inwardly, equally, daringly; A groundswell needed / Rejecting complacency."
—S*an D. Henry-Smith
"Spiral as Ritual is a meditation in the way that one might think of a hurricane—sustained winds whorled around the no-place of an eye or an ‘I’ (in absentia). McIntosh identifies the formation of an individuated subject as an expression of integrating a world dominated by racist settler-colonial conditions, present and past, which produce in their wake collateral destruction.”
—Joey de Jesus