In her poem "Landing" ( Passport to Here and There, Bloodaxe Books), Grace Nichols recalls her return to Guyana, the country she left for England at 27. But the part of me that is in life is in pain all the time. "I am not really in life, the author says. No further./ We avoided the courthouse, the census, the bank/ with its clock, tracking everyone's time but our own."ĭionne Brand's epic The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (Duke University Press) is a series of prose poem dialogues between a poet and her Blue Clerk, keeper of the poet's reams of pages-stored in bales on the dock of a mysterious wharf. And in "Message from the Free Smiths of Louisa County," she observes: "When you search for us now, you find silence./ You may trace us back to a moment. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact.," Kiki Petrosino writes in her poem "The Shop at Monticello," from White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (Sarabande Books). "I'm a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. But the amazing poetry I've been reading this summer is anything but safe. It promises safe, sundrenched verses-beach read poems.
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