I care about social justice, equality, and history, as well as beauty and art. As an African-American woman who was raised working class and who understands how history informs the present, I have fallen in love with the depiction of history in poetry and prose. Not all of my writing has something to do with race or gender or class, but all of my writing is about justice in some way. I want to get to the good of people.
Peculiar Heritage is a response to political upheaval and bigoted violence. But it is also an acceptance and welcoming of widespread growth in gender equality, LGBTQ+ acceptance, and racial justice, as well as a nod to hope.
When I started writing many of these poems in 2016, the United States was going through shaky political and social times. We had a wild election after the first Black president served for two terms, and many Americans feared a regression. I wondered then how did we get to that point, but I came to understand that it should not be shocking. From the peculiar institution that was slavery, through second-wave feminism and beyond, ebbs and flows within our borders should be expected.
It’s a beautiful book, from the cover to the notes. It’s a neo-slave narrative that follows various enslaved, then freed people. Through this book, I learned how poetry collections can be explorations of history based on fact.
Like any good collection, reading one poem compels you forward, but each poem can stand on its own. She is a master of form. For instance, her persona poetry is powerful. The first poem in the book, “The Trapper’s Boast,” devoid of empathy, shows the business of slavery from an undesirable point of view.
But what is moving is the ability to fall in love and to care even in the worst conditions, as well as the will to live and strive towards freedom in spite of any threats.
I started writing neo-slave narrative poems about a woman escaping slavery. I imagined that the poems I was writing, like Suck on the Marrow or Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (also a great book), would either grow into a full-length collection or a chapbook. They did not. I had less than enough for a chapbook and I was writing poems about protest, music, and love that did not fit the neo-slavery poems, but spoke to American history and present. When compiling the poems for my manuscript, I revisited Suck on the Marrow many times, as well as other books, to understand how to organize my work.
Also, though the subject is not quite the same, we do both talk about enslaved people and getting to freedom.
Suck on the Marrow is a historical narrative, revolving around six main characters and set in mid-19th century Virginia and Philadelphia. The book traces the experiences of fugitive slaves, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, and free people of color, exploring the interdependence between plantation life and life in Northern and Southern American towns and illuminating the connections between the successes and difficulties of a wide range of Americans, free and slave, black and white, Northern and Southern. This neo-slave narrative treats the truths of lives touched by slavery with…
This is a biography of Mother Ann Lee, the woman who brought the Shaker Religion to Colonial America. Extensively researched and beautifully rendered, these poems grab you and bring you into eighteenth-century England and New England. It is also a celebration of motherhood, love, death, and grief, as well as of an early American woman in leadership. Sometimes deceptively soft, the movement and violence of Colonial America will snap the reader forward, inviting us to question our past.
I revisited Ross’ book when writing about historical figures, mostly real. In my book, I looked at some historical figures, including Tituba and Harriet Tubman, and found reading Seedlip and Sweet Apple a good primer in writing historical poetry.
Seamlessly bridging the material and spiritual worlds, Seedlip and Sweet Apple takes the reader into the mind of a true visionary: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker religion in colonial America. With astonishingly original poems inspired by extensive historical research, Arra Lynn Ross creates a collection linked thematically through the voice and story of the woman who was believed by her followers to be Christ incarnate. Broadly and inclusively spiritual, this remarkable debut captures the ineffable experience of ecstatic vision, activating the progression from literal reality to heightened perception. Simultaneously, this journey delves into the manifold issues of…
Physically, a beautiful book. There are these drawings made with scratchboard illustrations and actual lace from a factory in Scranton, PA. The poems are gorgeous, whimsical pieces about a young woman in particular, but working women in general who produced lace.
Though historical, the factory did not close until 2002, and the building still stands. The book, however, is set in the past, in the 1930s, and follows a lesbian who works in the factory. I love the way that both Douaihy and Hermanson play with negative space, the white, and the dark of letters or lace.
Of course, I looked to this book for the historicity of it, and how Douaihy handled one character over time.
"Scranton Lace by Margot Douaihy combines tremendous lyric gifts-dense, nervy music, evocative images, an almost classically tragic sense of life's doomed blooming-with a gritty vernacularity that roots these poems in the rusted factory life of the title. Often formally playful but always brimming with emotion, using repetition in ways that evoke the ghostly graphics of lace woven through the book. Douaihy sings poetry's repertoire of love, loss, time and trial in keys that are wholly her own." -Joy Ladin "Margot Douaihy's Scranton Lace is a gorgeous meditation on place, on where we came from and what shapes and makes us.…
This book mixes personal poetry and history and art and space. It is a wonder! Smith looks at the Hubble Telescope and all of its marvels along with one of its engineers, her father Floyd Smith.
Smith mixes stars, David Bowie, mass shootings, love, racism, sexism all in this poetry collection and somehow, it works. It more than works. It explodes!
I don’t know if this work has much to do with my own; there is history, yes, and there is social commentary. But mostly, there is excellent poetry that is exemplary for any poet writing today.
In this brilliant collection of new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant and revisits kitschy concepts like 'love' and 'illness', now relegated to the museum of obsolescence. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe, accompanying the discoveries, failures and oddities of human existence and establishing Smith as one of the best poets of her generation.
These poems—most of every poem that Lee writes, really—do more than paint a picture. These poems appeal to every one of your senses. They are rich in description and you want to savor each one, sit with it, and let the poem envelop you.
I heard or read somewhere that Li-Young Lee is a slow writer, not producing a lot of work but always producing good work. I don’t know if this is true, and except for my greed of wanting to consume more of his words asap, I don’t mind that his poems are slower coming. I like to spend time with them.
I share Rose because Lee teaches me—and my students—that writers depend too much on visual imagery and fear spreading out into the other senses.
I. Epistle The Gift Persimmons The Weight Of Sweetness From Blossoms Dreaming Of Hair Early In The Morning Water Falling: The Code Nocturne My Indigo Irises Eating Alone
II. Always A Rose
III. Eating Together I Ask My Mother To Sing Ash, Snow, Or Moonlight The Life The Weepers Braiding Rain Diary My Sleeping Loved Ones Mnemonic Between Seasons Visions And Interpretations
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
