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What Had Happened Was
Sprache:
Englisch
Veröffentlicht/Copyright:
2025
Über dieses Buch
In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.
Information zu Autoren / Herausgebern
Therí Alyce Pickens is Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana at Bates College and author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, also published by Duke University Press, and New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States.
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“In this engaging new collection of poetry, Therí Alyce Pickens demonstrates that she is a poet of depth, range, and often incisive humor. Her poems are a revelation.”
-- John Keene, author of Punks: New and Selected Poems
-- John Keene, author of Punks: New and Selected Poems
“What Had Happened Was is a daring poet’s debut. First and foremost, I want to praise Therí Alyce Pickens’s collection for its unflinching attention to the nuances of—and everyday sorts of elaborate formal play embedded in—African American vernacular. It’s truly refreshing, and energizing, to see the dynamism of Black linguistic expression live a full life in contemporary American poetry this way. It’s all here. Love and loss, theory and autobiography, the ordinary and the transcendent.”
-- Joshua Bennett, author of Spoken Word: A Cultural History
-- Joshua Bennett, author of Spoken Word: A Cultural History
“Few debut poetry books are long awaited. Without a doubt, What Had Happened Was is. When you work tirelessly and patiently to master your art—with skill, wisdom, and an abundance of imagination—it reads like this.”
-- Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems
-- Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems
“Therí Alyce Pickens writes a poetics of the body that considers history, politics, race, gender, and the everyday mundane ways that they are experienced in bones, in the brain, and on the skin. While reading through What Had Happened Was, you may find that this Black poetics is crip poetics, is what people call the confessional voice. What Pickens confesses of the body is how the world makes the body a question. If you understand in depth the expression, the answer is in how one would begin: “What had happened was . . .”
-- Bettina Judd, author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought
-- Bettina Judd, author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought
“In her constantly surprising and deftly built poems, Therí Alyce Pickens enacts a poetics that refuses binaries, attends to and extends the power of Black art, and centers a body navigating illness. Pickens seamlessly moves through and braids memory, history, pop culture. The language is precise and remarkable; it will engage and entangle you in marvelous ways---as will the formally inventive poems and the structure itself. Pickens has written an electric first book. The poems are still sparking in my mind.”
-- Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine: Poems
-- Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine: Poems
"This collection demands attention and introspection by offering a raw yet eloquent portrayal of the intersections of history, identity, and systemic oppression. It’s an essential read for people seeking to honor the complexity of the experiences of Black Americans."
-- Jessica Calaway Library Journal
-- Jessica Calaway Library Journal
"Pickens . . . seamlessly explores personal narrative, Black American life, systemic injustices, pop culture, history and chronic disability. . . . Pickens boldly grounds readers in time and place with poems like 'On This Day' and 'Corona Poem,' while poems such as 'The Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death' illustrate the realities of living with chronic disabilities."
-- Okunyi Bëhree Seattle Times
-- Okunyi Bëhree Seattle Times
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Frontmatter
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CONTENTS
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THIS
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THAT
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MIND YOU
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& THE THIRD
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Let Me Holla at You Right Quick; or Notes
75 -
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I Ain’t Forget about Y’all; or Acknowledgments
81
Informationen zur Veröffentlichung
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
eBook veröffentlicht am:
18. Februar 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781478060505
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
eBook ISBN:
9781478060505
Zielgruppe(n) für dieses Buch
For a non-specialist adult audience
