The Shared World (poems)

Description

By (author) Francis Vievee

Short /annotation:
The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother.

:
The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother—with or without child. Francis challenges the ways in which Black women are often dismissed while expected to be nurturing. This raw assemblage of poetic narratives stares down the oppressors from within and writes a new language in the art of taking back the body and the memory. These poetic narratives are brutal in their lyrical blows, but tender with the bruised history left behind. “You can’t stop this / song,” she writes. “More hands than yours have closed / around my throat.”

Francis’s lyric gifts are on full display as she probes self-discovery, history, intimacy, and violence. Her voice encompasses humor and gravity, enigma and revelation. What emerges is a realm of intertwined experiences. “The secret to knowing the secret is to speak,” she concludes, “but we too often tell / the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does, matter. / In truth, we are bound by one story, so you’d think by now / we’d tell it, at least to each other.”

Table of contents:

• To Forget
• A Call to Arms
• Break Me and I’ll Sing
• Finding Myself in the Market of Accra
• Another Attempt at the Telling
• 1965
• The Shared World
• Honey
• Given to Rust
• On the Piney Woods, Death, Bobby Frank Cherry and Me
• The Keening
• The Poets Who Are Our Enemies
• When Your Brother Dies You Want
• I’ve Worn It Three Days in a Row
• Ugly Fruit
• Everything is Berlin
• Dead or Alive, The Rats Ignore Us
• Juneteenth(#3)
• The Smell
• Accidental City
• Provincetown, MA
• You Prefer Us Dead
• Alright, I Am the One You Prefer Dead
• The Quiver Tree
• Marvin Gaye: Mercy
• I Have Been Witness and Victim
• Yes, Among Them
• I’ve Been Thinking About Love Again
• I Know That Music
• Birdsong Like a Child’s
• Marvin Gaye: Sugar
• Uncle Sonny
• Bless the Kindling World
• Brother of Skulls
• Room for One
• Omnivore
• The Fisherman Speaks Again of his Days
• The Lie
• And Upon That Pale Horse a Paler Woman
• Emmett, I said Wait
• The Marsh King
• Without End
• Reading Neruda at 2:00 AM
• The River Shivers as Much as I
• The Winter Kingdom
• Small Reprieve
• To Be Touched as Sophia
• The Sound
• Epiphany: Parable of the Tongue Cut by Strings
• That Cat
• Returns
• The Wheel of the Bus: A Fiction
• Relevance
• An Unkindness Of
• Landscape
• My Dolls Were Just That
• Meat Eater
• Goat Heart
• I Am the Only One I Know Who Can Cook Them
• Br’er Rabbit’s Hole
• What The Fat Man Taught
• Mother Tongue
• Why I Don’t Wait
• The Company of Wolves
• The Shore
• Nouvea Slim
• The Morning I Miss Such Devotion
• Everywhere and Here Too
• Canzone in Blue, Then Bluer
• Muleskinners
• The World Contracts
• Moan Soft Like You Wanted Somebody Terrible
• Cannibal
• In A Lesser Paradise
• Goat
• Fantastica Melancholia
• The Dead Horse
• The Cannibal Myth
• Ota Benga’s Case