BIPOC Poetry Collection
Here are some suggestions for your Summer Book Bingo NW 2023 category: BIPOC Poetry Collection. Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed.
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& More Black
T'ai freedom ford's second collection of poems, & MORE BLACK, is direct, ingenious, vibrant, alive, queer, & BLACK. By turns tough and sexy, wrapped up in the evolving language and sonics of life, these poems take their cue from Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets as they rhapsodize and dialogue with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, and Wangechi Mutu, along with many other musicians, artists, and writers. The kinetic energy of ford's words leap off the page in rebellious, stunning, and revelatory fashion--poems that mesmerize with sheer velocity and telling pauses.
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Be Recorder
Offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world; investigates the precariousness of personhood; and turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it.
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Availability: Available
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Weaving Sundown in A Scarlet Light
"In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo's inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth"--.
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Availability: Available
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Creeland
Creeland is a poetry collection concerned with notions of home and the quotidian attachments we feel to those notions, even across great distances. Even in an area such as Treaty Eight (northern Alberta), a geography decimated by resource extraction and development, people are creating, living, laughing, surviving and flourishing—or at least attempting to. The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the role of Indigenous aesthetics in the creation and nurturing of complex Indigenous lifeworlds. They aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree economies enable, and the words that try—and ultimately fail—to articulate them. Hunt gestures to the movements, speech acts and relations that exceed available vocabularies, that may be housed within words like joy, but which the words themselves cannot fully convey.
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Slingshot
Slingshot begins with the author ensconced in the safe, soft, isolation of the rural pastoral, but once the author and the work move into urban space, monsters get bigger and wilder: sexual violence, institutionalization, mental hospitals, jails and prisons, and houselessness. In these messy, sad, horny, desperate poems full of dream logic, Cyree Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of being multiply marginalized, as black people are consistently forced to the periphery of societal care, then punished for the choices made to stay alive, while being implicated in the marginalization of others. Slingshot appropriates formalism from whiteness, then flays it and uses whatever structure is prettiest to build poems inside of its skeleton. (Publisher)
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Alive at the End of the World
In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us. Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. (NoveList)
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Whereas
Whereas confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.
Format: Book
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Mankiller Poems
Wilma Mankiller was not known as a poet. With a tip from her husband, Charlie Soap, and her friend, Kristina Kiehl, Pulley Press founders learned that Mankiller had been writing poetry throughout her life. After searching through her barn at Mankiller Flats in Adair County Oklahoma, Greg Shaw and Frances McCue located 19 of the 20 poems published here. The 20th came from the collection of Kristina Kiehl. The poems show Mankiller's engagement with her own artistry and reflection upon her life, particularly her Native heritage and the role of women in the world. (Publisher)
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Black Girl, Call Home
A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
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Finna
"Definition of Finna, created by the author: fin na /'fine/ contraction: (1) going to ; intending to. rooted in African American Vernacular English. (2) eye dialect spelling of "fixing to." (3) Black possibility ; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America&;s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.
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