dark // thing by Ashley M. Jones
dark // thing is a multi-faceted work that explores the darkness/otherness by which the world sees Black people. Ashley M. Jones stares directly into the face of the racism that allows people to be seen as dark things, as objects that can be killed/enslaved/oppressed/devalued. This work, full as it is of slashes of all kinds, ultimately separates darkness from thingness, affirming and celebrating humanity. Request a print copy.
Stones: The Collected Short Poems of Charles Ghigna
Though mostly known for his children’s books and poems, Ghigna published his first book of poetry in 1989. Three years later he published his first book of children’s poetry. Stones gathers the tight poetic works of Ghigna in a single volume. Request a print copy.
House Repairs by Angela Jackson-Brown
From the author: “I call this collection House Repairs because life is a continual process of rebuilding, remodeling and re-envisioning ourselves. Sometimes we are in total disrepair and other times we are firm in the foundation we have created for ourselves through the struggles we have had to endure. My hope is that this book will continue to remind me of how far I have come and will remind others that they too can embark on a journey of renewal and healing, and yes, rebuilding.” Request a print copy.
Mend by Kwoya Fagin Maples
The inventor of the speculum, J. Marion Sims, is celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” and a memorial at his birthplace honors “his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike.” These tributes whitewash the fact that Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on eleven enslaved African American women. Lent to Sims by their owners, these women were forced to undergo operations without their consent. Today, the names of all but three of these women are lost.
In Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims’s autobiography: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims’s lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as “bruised fruit.” At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience. Request a print copy.
The Coal Life: Poems by Adam Vines
In many of the poems in The Coal Life, Adam Vines, an avid outdoorsman and former professional landscaper for nearly twenty years, explores the cultural landscape of Alabama coal-mining camps in the first half of the twentieth century and how the industry can shape and distort a cultural text similar to the way it contorts and upturns the physical landscape. Other poems in the collection—some autobiographical, some assuming the personae of voices as varied as Gauguin, Magritte’s Daemon, Georg Cantor, post-Eden Adam, Hamlet, and an old fisherman railing against new-fangled technology—express how we are all mining our memories, our cultures, and the natural world in an attempt to grope toward identity. Vines reminds us that poetry embodies and preserves transient emotion, perception, and flesh just as coal compacts and ossifies the vitality of an ancient landscape, and he reveals that the charge of the poet is to mine language, extract it and haul it to the surface, separate from it what is useless, and palm what will rekindle the fire of living experience. Request a print copy.
Text above from publishers’ descriptions and author websites.