Shotgun Seamstress: An Anthology

In 2006, Osa Atoe was the only Black kid at the punk show in Portland, and created her now-legendary zine Shotgun Seamstress to capture her experiences as a Black, queer woman in the punk community—a space that preaches radical difference but which often recreates mainstream culture's inequalities. Each issue featured photocopied essays, interviews, historical explorations, and reviews, paying tribute to free Black expression and interrupt notions of a monolithic Black culture. Collected here, Shotgun Seamstress vividly illustrates Black creativity as the source of rock music itself, highlighting past and present artists like Vaginal Cream Davis, Detroit's trailblazing Death, Poly Styrene, Bay Area rocker Brontez Purnell, British post-punk Rachel Aggs, Detroit garage king Mick Collins, and many others. As Osa writes, it's “all of our possibilities instead of allowing the dominant culture to tell us what it means to be Black," now anthologized for the masses. (Short Discount)