The preservation of personal history is a delicate thing: part storytelling, part translation, part feeling, and a good part listening. “Jim Tells a Parable of the Seed," “Beatrice Prayer to be Reborn in the South as an Old Cypress," and the collection "South Flight" are closely inspired by my experience of growing up in Oklahoma as the daughter of Black Southerners and my interpretation of the histories that surround the year of 1921 including the inception of the Great Northern Migration, the pinnacle of Oklahoma Black towns, and the peripheral impact of the Tulsa Race Massacre and Red Summer. Apart from unpacking these histories, I have tried my best to capture my experience of growing up in the South marked by an exquisite legacy of survival, Black reciprocity to the land, and its terrible beauty: those partial truths and egregious misunderstandings passed down through generations behind closed doors like a family heirloom whose origins are not entirely known— the lyric of the black Pentecostal church—Black Ophelias of blue and goose grasses, magnates of egg & preserve monies— the secret stowaways of love letters in the hope chests at the foot of their beds— and the men who very well might perish if they didn’t dream of flight.
Jasmine Elizabeth Smith on "South Flight" |
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"Apartments of New York City Literary Legends"
"New York Living Rooms is not exactly about interior decoration. Although it represents a special stylistic and aesthetic approach, it is above all a document. No rearranging, no adding of bouquets, no use of flood lights. I approach the living rooms like I approach the people I photograph: a portrait as close to reality as possible."
via LIT HUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on Jane Augustine's Traverse
"Spare, unselfconscious, nearly transparent, Augustine’s poems reach out to the things of this world like a ship whose constant soundings describe its own location. No part of her lived experience is excluded, so a reader may find herself meditating on a painting, carrying a backpack, searching for a homeless man under a scaffold, or pulled suddenly back to a parent’s death-night twenty years before." |
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