Nursery Rhymes in Black: Poems: Permafrost Prize Series
Autor Latorial Faisonen Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 iul 2025 – vârsta ani
The collection highlights family, overcoming adversity, and endurance from the African American female perspective and celebrates the individuals and experiences that shape life and have catapulted the author into a unique existence. Narrative poems give voice to the Black Southern girlhood experience of being saved, nurtured, inspired, and even challenged by plight and circumstance. Strengthened by her experiences, Faison provides power, courage, and wisdom that resonate deeply. These poems walk in naked truth on a lyrical, musical tightrope as each brings wisdom and honesty in the intimacy of arranged words. Faison takes readers along the development of her own identity, considering stories of unsung heroes, the hands that feed us, the ancestors and traditions that shape us, and the challenging ways race, history, education, and culture intersect. With this spiritually moving collection, Faison joins all poets and writers who have come to prolifically amplify Black voices, to tell Black stories, to continue the Black literary tradition we have been gifted.
In these poems, Faison calls readers into poetic fellowship with the memories, the legacies, the truths of Black women in the South. There is reverence, history, and glory on these pages celebrating the hands, hearts, work, trouble, and ways of Black women and all the ways they teach, become, fascinate, struggle, survive, and exist in the world. Nursery Rhymes in Black lulls us—but not to sleep. Rather, to wake up, to speak out, to take a stand, to advocate as we pause to remember, understand, and celebrate.
Preț: n/a
Nou
Disponibilitate incertă
Doresc să fiu notificat când acest titlu va fi disponibil:
Se trimite...
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781646427277
ISBN-10: 1646427270
Pagini: 64
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: University of Alaska Press
Colecția University of Alaska Press
Seria Permafrost Prize Series
ISBN-10: 1646427270
Pagini: 64
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: University of Alaska Press
Colecția University of Alaska Press
Seria Permafrost Prize Series
Recenzii
“Latorial Faison embodies the creed, ‘She who gives love / Must learn to organize pain,’ for her embrace of the joyful and often sorrowful experiences of Black life is accomplished with such cultural precision and old-fashioned wisdom. She demands from us a listen.”
—Dr. Joanne Veal Gabbin, founder of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and executive director of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective
“These heart-stopping poems transport us through the life-journey of a Southern mother, an orphan who became a widely respected elder. Faison, her mournful daughter, uses deep grieving as the vehicle to move this body of poems. This is a mother who, in spite of strict segregation, was a valiant, seemingly invincible parent, even facing down terminal cancer. In the midst of putting her mother on a pedestal, though, the poet shows the fault-lines of common mortals. The daughter/poet celebrates the mother/near-to-an-angel in glorious phraseology. ‘Black & woman / you always rose again . . . a whole cloud of witnesses weeping.’ But Mama was also a practical goddess who kept up insurance policies on everybody in the household, what the poet ironically calls ‘a way to go fund ourselves.’ These poems explain the Black Holy Ghost, the ‘white Jesus / Hanging high’ on frames in Black living rooms, the lynching tree, post–Jim Crow, Southampton County, VA, and slow integration. But the poems about Mama ground the collection and elevate it simultaneously.”
—Judy Juanita, author of Virgin Soul and The Black Experience in Four Genres
“Creatively constructing the intricacies of memory and familial advice associated with small-town Virginia, Latorial Faison probes African American and family history, parent/child relationships, work, sexuality, racial interactions, racism, and death/loss/grief. With strong feminine influences that shaped her life, Faison celebrates that strength, its basis in a sometimes-problematic religion, and its transcendence of that origin. Mother and grandmother figures are always near, and their loss, as in ‘How to Bury Your Mama,’ may shake the foundations for a moment, but the tradition from which they come thrives. Nursery Rhymes in Black captures a time and a place that are no less powerful because they are more memory than just down the street. Faison invites readers to see that world, that light, those lives, that history through the eyes of a faithfully attentive observer and analyst.”
—Trudier Harris, author of Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South and Bigger: A Literary Life
“A masterful love letter to her mother, with each verse serving as both tribute and deep reflection. The beautiful opening poem, ‘Mama as a Negro Spiritual,’ locates, orients us, and sets the tone for the entire collection. The poet observes her mother’s ability to transform pain into love and the effort it requires. Her mother is revealed as Ms. Shirley, the lunch lady; the bus driver; Sammy’s wife; and a boundless giver of self. The poet is boundless too and grapples with the realities of Virginia, particularly Southampton County. While acknowledging that past injustices cannot be undone, Faison confronts them head on. Nursery Rhymes in Blackstands as a testament to the power of bearing witness—to both people and place—as a means of claiming individual and generational space. It’s an act of speaking out during hardship and grief, a full-throated Hallelujah Anyhow!”
—Glenis Redmond, author of The Listening Skin and The Song of Everything
“Latorial Faison’s debut is above all a meditation upon the heart of a loving Black mother, a Proverbs 31 woman as apt to quote headlines from the latest copy of The Tidewater News as she is to quote scripture. Mama prepares for rainy days and dying breaths, keeps a dollar in her pocket, and knows her way around her white folks like she knows her kitchen. She inculcates her children with a faith that has sustained her and surrounds them with ancestors who are proof of abundant life in this rural Virginia county best known for Nat Turner’s rebellion. Faison’s Courtland is no New Jerusalem—after all, here are segregation academies and old hanging trees—but there is its Ridley Road. Let us sing of Youth Dew, penny candy, and Easter Sunday dinner on this side of Jordan.”
—Cedric Tillman, author of Lilies in the Valley and In My Feelins
—Dr. Joanne Veal Gabbin, founder of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and executive director of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective
“These heart-stopping poems transport us through the life-journey of a Southern mother, an orphan who became a widely respected elder. Faison, her mournful daughter, uses deep grieving as the vehicle to move this body of poems. This is a mother who, in spite of strict segregation, was a valiant, seemingly invincible parent, even facing down terminal cancer. In the midst of putting her mother on a pedestal, though, the poet shows the fault-lines of common mortals. The daughter/poet celebrates the mother/near-to-an-angel in glorious phraseology. ‘Black & woman / you always rose again . . . a whole cloud of witnesses weeping.’ But Mama was also a practical goddess who kept up insurance policies on everybody in the household, what the poet ironically calls ‘a way to go fund ourselves.’ These poems explain the Black Holy Ghost, the ‘white Jesus / Hanging high’ on frames in Black living rooms, the lynching tree, post–Jim Crow, Southampton County, VA, and slow integration. But the poems about Mama ground the collection and elevate it simultaneously.”
—Judy Juanita, author of Virgin Soul and The Black Experience in Four Genres
“Creatively constructing the intricacies of memory and familial advice associated with small-town Virginia, Latorial Faison probes African American and family history, parent/child relationships, work, sexuality, racial interactions, racism, and death/loss/grief. With strong feminine influences that shaped her life, Faison celebrates that strength, its basis in a sometimes-problematic religion, and its transcendence of that origin. Mother and grandmother figures are always near, and their loss, as in ‘How to Bury Your Mama,’ may shake the foundations for a moment, but the tradition from which they come thrives. Nursery Rhymes in Black captures a time and a place that are no less powerful because they are more memory than just down the street. Faison invites readers to see that world, that light, those lives, that history through the eyes of a faithfully attentive observer and analyst.”
—Trudier Harris, author of Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South and Bigger: A Literary Life
“A masterful love letter to her mother, with each verse serving as both tribute and deep reflection. The beautiful opening poem, ‘Mama as a Negro Spiritual,’ locates, orients us, and sets the tone for the entire collection. The poet observes her mother’s ability to transform pain into love and the effort it requires. Her mother is revealed as Ms. Shirley, the lunch lady; the bus driver; Sammy’s wife; and a boundless giver of self. The poet is boundless too and grapples with the realities of Virginia, particularly Southampton County. While acknowledging that past injustices cannot be undone, Faison confronts them head on. Nursery Rhymes in Blackstands as a testament to the power of bearing witness—to both people and place—as a means of claiming individual and generational space. It’s an act of speaking out during hardship and grief, a full-throated Hallelujah Anyhow!”
—Glenis Redmond, author of The Listening Skin and The Song of Everything
“Latorial Faison’s debut is above all a meditation upon the heart of a loving Black mother, a Proverbs 31 woman as apt to quote headlines from the latest copy of The Tidewater News as she is to quote scripture. Mama prepares for rainy days and dying breaths, keeps a dollar in her pocket, and knows her way around her white folks like she knows her kitchen. She inculcates her children with a faith that has sustained her and surrounds them with ancestors who are proof of abundant life in this rural Virginia county best known for Nat Turner’s rebellion. Faison’s Courtland is no New Jerusalem—after all, here are segregation academies and old hanging trees—but there is its Ridley Road. Let us sing of Youth Dew, penny candy, and Easter Sunday dinner on this side of Jordan.”
—Cedric Tillman, author of Lilies in the Valley and In My Feelins
Notă biografică
Latorial Faison is an American poet, author, veteran military spouse, mother, and assistant professor of English and creative writing. Her writing continues the African American literary tradition and explores the intersections of the Black experience in terms of race, culture, and identity. Faison’s poetry and creative nonfiction have been published extensively in literary outlets, such as Callaloo, Obsidian: Literature & Art in the African Diaspora, Aunt Chloe, Stonecoast Review, Artemis Journal, Prairie Schooner, West Trestle Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Southern Women’s Review, About Place Journal, Deep South Magazine, and others. She is the author of The Missed Education of the Negro: An Examination of the Black Segregated Experience in Southampton County, Virginia 1950–1970, Mother to Son, I Am Woman, Love Poems, and the trilogy collection 28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History. A Tom Howard Poetry Prize recipient and Pushcart nominee, Faison has also been awarded fellowships from Furious Flower Poetry Center, Virginia Humanities, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and the Hudson Valley Writers Center. She currently serves on the faculty of Virginia State University.
Descriere
Nursery Rhymes in Black is a poetic recollection of race, roots, culture, and identity. Paying homage to the memory and work of elders and ancestors, Latorial Faison remembers her own matriarch, mother, grandmother—the rich memories of having grown up in rural, historic Southampton County, Virginia.