The Shared World
Poems
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother—with or without child. Francis challenges the ways in which Black women are often dismissed while expected to be nurturing. This raw assemblage of poetic narratives stares down the oppressors from within and writes a new language in the art of taking back the body and the memory. These poetic narratives are brutal in their lyrical blows but tender with the bruised history left behind. “You can’t stop this / song,” she writes. “More hands than yours have closed / around my throat.”
Francis’s lyric gifts are on full display as she probes self-discovery, history, intimacy, and violence. Her voice encompasses humor and gravity, enigma and revelation. What emerges is a realm of intertwined experiences. “The secret to knowing the secret is to speak,” she concludes, “but we too often tell / the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does matter. / In truth, we are bound by one story, so you’d think by now / we’d tell it, at least to each other.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bountiful and superbly crafted fourth collection by Francis (Forest Primeval) draws from her experience as a Black woman in the U.S., from the West Texas Panhandle to Detroit, South Carolina to "this free Vermont border": "I am not safe/ anyplace, and no place can save me. Just look what the mountains/ have done to me. Exactly what the city did—and then some." In a voice that bristles and moans ("like marrow, a blood-yolk/ spilled upon the counter"), the poet challenges the reader, "I am not/ afraid of a word. You say black/ I say Blacker," and speaks as witness and guide: "History can't be shaken, brushed off./ It can only be... addressed. Where it lives// I go. Take my hand. I'll take you./ There, there." Icons of Black history anchor many pieces, including Marvin Gaye, Rosa Parks, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the victims of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing: "I knew early on I could be blown to bits by any/ white man with enough rage." "I haven't given up but have so little left/ to give," Francis writes. "That's right. Sometimes/ we settle for whatever/ doesn't harm." Fierce and tender, probing and pitiless, this outstanding volume reveals the resonance and range of the poet's exceptional work. (Apr.)
