Perfect black

Wilkinson, Crystal (author.). Davis, Ronald W., 1967- (illustrator.). Finney, Nikky, (writer of foreword.).

Summary: In these poems, the writer walks us back down the road she first walked as a girl, wanders us through the trees that lined the road where she grew up, where her sensibilities as a woman and a writer were first laid bare. In one of the first poems that opens the collection, she is a woman looking back on her life, on the soil and mountains that first stamped the particular sound of her voice, and she is deeply inquisitive about how it all fell into place: "The map of me can't be all hills & mountains even though I've been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two." This is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this Black writing girl's body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. --

Record details

ISBN: 0813151163
ISBN: 9780813151168
ISBN: 0813151155
ISBN: 9780813151151
ISBN: 9780813151335
ISBN: 0813151333
ISBN: 9780813151212
ISBN: 081315121X
Physical Description: 1 online resource
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Publisher: Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2021]

Content descriptions

Formatted Contents Note:

Foreword / Nikky Finney -- Terrain ; Baptism (Flatwoods, Kentucky, 1972) ; Cousin ; Black Rapunzel ; Asking about My Mother ; The Water Witch on Salvation ; The Water Witch on Invasion ; The Water Witch on Reading ; O Tobacco ; The Visit ; Dig If You Will the Picture ; Slow Dance ; The Creek -- My Father Was a City ; Beyond the White Canvas ; August 9, 1974 ; Wet Nurse ; The Bath ; Dropsy ; Death March ; Dear Johnny P ; Mother's Day ; Bones ; Ole Fashioned ; Black Farmer ; Press ; Dirge ; Black Body ; A Meditation on Grief ; On Being Country -- Bloodroot ; Kitchen Ghosts ; Snow Falls Like a Scorned Woman's Tears ; Black & Fat & Perfect ; Witness ; Coming of Age ; Dance ; Homestead ; Heritage ; Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts ; Motherland ; Winter.

Source of Description Note:

Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on June 04, 2021).