The cracks in my heart have not come from bodies offered in the guise of honey; haven’t shaken my hand seconds too long; taken my eyes for gazing balls; my limbs for casualwear. What pocks its surface could be mistaken for the debris their kind leave behind
Please consider your institution--university, library, non-profit invited to engage with us in readings, talks, and panels. Also, ORDER THE BOOK! revisitingtheelegy.org @blmelegy.org
Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers.
I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t want to belong to something or somebody. Not ownership belong to but be a part of belong to. Even me. I say even me because I’m a natural, albeit ironic, loner. Ironic because I’m a twin and we make two of five sisters. Ironic still because there [...]
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"Don’t misunderstand me. I believe in the power of poetry to heal and change but sometimes I am so tired of the atrocities in the world. One book of poems is just not enough. How do we make the blues go away. I want to write poems that incite, inspire a better world."
2017 has been life affirming. I haven't taken y'all on the cardiomyopathy carousel much this year because technically it's all rather new; a little up and down like the carousel horsies; a little boring as incremental change can be; and more than anything for all my say-it-anyway-you-can banner waving, ummm, I'd rather not. Besides, I am so, so Here. And other people that were in my brand of canoe don't always get to say that. So, about being Here. That good girl project has been doing big things this year!
I'll be reading poems from Marrow, my manuscript about the Peoples Temple, a congregation of Americans who emigrated to Jonestown Guyana and were coerced into suicide by their spiritual leader.
Talking to myself--especially when it becomes a lot of talk all of a sudden, always tells me there is something I'm trying to work out of my brain and especially out of my body. It's interesting that I haven't been able to run lately, one of my choice ways of working stuff out of my mind and body.
a donut had fallen in a rush to breakfast
its sticky footprint darkening and travelling
through every room, the cough following it
