Anarcha Speaks

Anarcha Speaks
Author: Dominique Christina
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0807009318

The reimagined story of Anarcha, an enslaved Black woman, subjected to medical experiments by Dr. Marion Sims. Selected by Tyehimba Jess as a National Poetry Series winner. In this provocative collection by award-winning poet and artist Dominique Christina, the historical life of Anarcha is personally reenvisioned. Anarcha was an enslaved Black woman who endured experimentation and torture at the hands of Dr. Marion Sims, more commonly known as the father of modern gynecology. Christina enables Anarcha to tell her story without being relegated to the margins of history, as a footnote to Dr. Sims’s life. These poems are a reckoning, a resurrection, and a proper way to remember Anarcha . . . and grieve her.

If I Can Cook/You Know God Can

If I Can Cook/You Know God Can
Author: Ntozake Shange
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2019-01-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0807021458

New edition available. Search ISBN 9780807021446. Acclaimed artist Ntozake Shange offers this delightfully eclectic tribute to black cuisine as a food of life that reflects the spirit and history of a people. With recipes such as "Cousin Eddie's Shark with Breadfruit" and "Collard Greens to Bring You Money," Shange instructs us in the nuances of a cuisine born on the slave ships of the Middle Passage, spiced by the jazz of Duke Ellington, and shared by all members of the African Diaspora. Rich with personal memories and historical insight, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can is a vivid story of the migration of a people, and the cuisine that marks their living legacy and celebration of taste.

FemPoetiks of American Poetry and Americana Music

FemPoetiks of American Poetry and Americana Music
Author: Linda Nicole Blair
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1793621276

From the poems of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Emily Dickinson emerges what the author calls FemPoetiks, a discourse of female empowerment. Situating the work of these poets in their historical eras, Linda Nicole Blair considers a sampling of their poems side-by-side with a number of song lyrics by singer-songwriters Brandi Carlile, Rhiannon Giddens, and Lucinda Williams, having found commonalities of theme, motif, and language between them. Blair argues that while FemPoetiks has continued to develop in various ways in American poetry by women, the fact that this discourse finds expression in songs by Americana female artists indicates a matrilineal line of influence from the 1630s to today. In order to show the omnipresence of this powerful feminist discourse, she closes this book with eleven interviews she conducted with female singer-songwriters from around the United States. The phenomenon of FemPoetiks is not limited to the arts but extends into all areas of American life, from the domestic to the political. FemPoetiks is a woman’s truth.

Museum of the Americas

Museum of the Americas
Author: J. Michael Martinez
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2018-10-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0143133446

Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry Winner of the National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Cornelius Eady--an exploration in verse of imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity "Marvelous, argumentative, and curiosity-provoking" --The New York Times Book Review The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be coded with the trans-historical consequences of an imperial narrative. Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings, morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans, the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath, and fashioned under, a racializing aesthetic gaze. Martinez questions how "knowledge" of the body is organized through visual perception of that body, hypothesizing the corporeal as a repository of the human situation, a nexus of culture. Museum of the Americas' poetic revives and repurposes the persecuted ethnic body from the appropriations that render it an art object and, therefore, diposable.

What It Doesn't Have to Do With

What It Doesn't Have to Do With
Author: Lindsay Bernal
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0820353957

Lindsay Bernal’s What It Doesn’t Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems. Through quick turns and juxtapositions, Lindsay Bernal navigates the paradoxical states of grief and love, alternating between vulnerability and irony, despair and humor. Her wry, contemporary voice confronts serious subjects with unpredictable wit.

feeld

feeld
Author: Jos Charles
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Total Pages: 79
Release: 2018-08-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1571319913

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A NEW YORKER BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 A VULTURE BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018 Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, Jos Charles’s revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. “i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer—making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.

You Don't Have to Be Everything

You Don't Have to Be Everything
Author: Diana Whitney
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 1523510994

Poems to Turn to Again and Again – from Amanda Gorman, Sharon Olds, Kate Baer, and More Created and compiled just for young women, You Don’t Have to Be Everything is filled with works by a wide range of poets who are honest, unafraid, and skilled at addressing the complex feelings of coming-of-age, from loneliness to joy, longing to solace, attitude to humor. These unintimidating poems offer girls a message of self-acceptance and strength, giving them permission to let go of shame and perfectionism. The cast of 68 poets is extraordinary: Amanda Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, who read at Joe Biden's inauguration; bestselling authors like Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Acevedo, Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Mary Oliver; Instagram-famous poets including Kate Baer, Melody Lee, and Andrea Gibson; poets who are LGBTQ, poets of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, poets who sing of human experience in ways that are free from conventional ideas of femininity. Illustrated in full color with work by three diverse artists, this book is an inspired gift for daughters and granddaughters—and anyone on the path to becoming themselves. No matter how old you are, it helps to be young when you're coming to life, to be unfinished, a mysterious statement, a journey from star to star. —Joy Ladin, excerpt from "Survival Guide"

Bless the Blood

Bless the Blood
Author: Walela Nehanda
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 0593529499

A searing debut YA poetry and essay collection about a Black cancer patient who faces medical racism after being diagnosed with leukemia in their early twenties, for fans of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Laurie Halse Anderson's Shout. When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of "well-meaning" but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online. But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from another realm. Walela's diagnosis becomes a catalyst for their self-realization. As they fill out forms in the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles or travel to therapy in wealthier neighborhoods, they begin to understand that cancer is where all forms of their oppression intersect: Disabled. Fat. Black. Queer. Nonbinary. In Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir, the author details a galvanizing account of their survival despite the U.S. medical system, and of the struggle to face death unafraid.

It Ain't Over Til the Bisexual Speaks

It Ain't Over Til the Bisexual Speaks
Author: Various
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2024-05-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1839971967

'Bisexuality allows for so many ways to desire and to express that desire. Plurality is at the heart of bisexuality' The bisexual experience is, by necessity, incredibly diverse - we are likely to be attracted to different genders, form part of multiple marginalised groups, and be perceived (depending on the gender of our partner) in wildly different ways.. This anthology is a radical and ambitious attempt to capture the incredible multiplicity of bisexual identities. With essays that unpack the intersectionality and conflict of bisexuality with history, language, sexual violence, class identity, religion, polyamory, gender critical ideology, fatness, trans activism, the asylum system, literature and anarchy - this collection of bi voices demands to be heard.. With contributions from Shiri Eisner, Hafsa Qureshi, Zachary Zane, Heron Greenesmith, and many, many more...