Protection Spell
Poems
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins
“A poet of great heart and brave directness.”
—Billy Collins
In Protection Spell Jennifer Givhan explores the guilt, sadness, and freedom of relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on for no reason other than love, the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life and to each other despite the pain (or perhaps because of it). These poems reassemble safe spaces from the fissures cleaving the speaker’s own biracial home and act as witnesses speaking to the racial iniquity of our broader social landscape as well as to the precarious standpoint of a mother-woman of color whose body lies vulnerable to trauma and abuse. From insistent moments of bravery, a collection of poems arises that asks the impossible, like the childhood chant that palliates suffering by demanding nothing less than magical healing: sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanas mañana (the frog who loses his tail is commanded to grow another). In the end, Givhan’s verse offers a place where healing may begin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a second collection that beats with multiple hearts, Givhan (Landscape with Headless Mama) addresses complicated familial identity, writing of her own Mexican-American background, her mixed-race husband, and their adopted black child. The book is full of anxiety over the vulnerability of children, specifically her own child's identity and how she can protect him. Givhan writes of the initial apprehension, "after the gauge of my uterus/ had fixed itself on empty.// I'd made peace with the threat of/ you're not my real' mother." She also confronts the racism embedded in the adoption process: how the "white ones cost ten grand more." Throughout, Givhan exposes the enduring animosity and aggression towards biracial families, doing so with candor and sparkling language. Every line is tightly composed, and the sensory details pull the reader towards the poet as she recounts her splintered world her past as well as the present world she creates and navigates as a woman and a mother of color. Chronicling the cruelty that children endure at the hands of adults, Givhan casts the eponymous spell for her son and her family. Givhan asks readers to witness racial inequity beside her and imagine a better future how, we, too, have the power to cast a spell so that every human feels secure, safe, protected.
