Light the candle as you say your name.

This book prompts the beginning of a ritual: speaking and lighting, marring the sandpaper surface, and beginning a timer: one that will expire as wax pools and depletes. Once the candle is lit, the light flickers across the white paper sides of the box, showing a line of watermarked text that stretches around the walls. These words, “Blow out the candle when you/remember the last time/your name was mispronounced,” set the limits of the ritual. Open to interpretation and individual introspection to complete the action, it gives a physicality to the break as a form of material to be considered.

This is a book about the importance of names. They are fragile spells, calling us into existence and propelling us. It is a joy to have your name pronounced correctly, to be seen; it is a small death to be mispronounced, miscalled. The power of names is a reflection on the power of language and the ways it distributes itself unevenly along the larger systems of capital, land, and bodies.