Casual Conversation
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy.
Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause.
Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this urgent, vehement, and sardonic debut, White questions the status quo, public and private discourse, and hope. As a salient motif, she invites the reader to reassess their perceptions: "congratulations,/ you have chosen what makes it easier to not see me with difficulty. I understand/ how hard it can be to know in order for you to eat, someone else had to starve" ("november 9, 2016"). In the trenchant "lump," White envisions creating an illustration for the police: "in this part the girl is without head./ I draw her bone-jut and sweet—/ an extravagant lump referencing what isn't present." She proceeds to powerfully declare that "perhaps a headless girl can be imagined humanely./ perhaps this girl will be treated as if she were/ headed...// gonna make me a girl you can't knee press,/ officer. Make her of ground she's already down on.// you can't tell her ‘get down' further if she is/ ground itself." The language throughout is textural, limber, and torrential, suited to be read aloud as White captures the daily struggles faced by women of color.
