Casual Conversation

by Renia White, Aracelis Girmay (Foreword by)

Overview

A Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy.

Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause.

Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950774555
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Series:	New Poets of America , #47
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Renia White is the author of Casual Conversation (BOA Editions, 2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Originally from PG County, Maryland, her family relocated to the southside of Atlanta the same year she turned 13. She went on to earn her BA from Howard Universityand her MFA from Cornell Universitywhere she also taught. A BOAAT fellow, she received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award in poetry. Her work appears in publications such as The Offing, Slice, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in New York City.

Table of Contents

Foreword Aracelis Girmay 9

I.

Hearsay 13

As far as you know, nothing can kill you 14

The man beside me considers me beside him. 15

My mother wants to live in a gated community 17

In this village 18

Casual conversation 19

I am not prepared for the inverse of this. 21

All over, but only here 22

In this town 24

Cue the lights 26

Misgiving 27

Some plans should be thwarted 28

II.

36c 31

Half dozens 32

November 9, 2016 34

In the name of half-sistering 35

The space between 37

To banish 38

Beneath 39

Casual conversation 40

Conjuring 42

Challenger 43

Lump 45

Love can make a man forget 47

Girl says, that happens to women too 48

Meanwhile 49

Sometimes I flash forward and cry 50

III.

Aurify 53

Making your way 54

To hover 55

Un- 56

I know you don't need me 58

Ambit 59

Why everybody wanna be singular? 60

Surplus 61

Gather them & give them back to me. 62

In case you'd consider it 63

Bright, bright, bright 64

Notes 66

Acknowledgments 67

About the Author 69

Colophon 72

Editorial Reviews

04/18/2022

In this urgent, vehement, and sardonic debut, White questions the status quo, public and private discourse, and hope. As a salient motif, she invites the reader to reassess their perceptions: "congratulations,/ you have chosen what makes it easier to not see me with difficulty. I understand/ how hard it can be to know in order for you to eat, someone else had to starve" ("november 9, 2016"). In the trenchant "lump," White envisions creating an illustration for the police: "in this part the girl is without head./ I draw her bone-jut and sweet—/ an extravagant lump referencing what isn't present." She proceeds to powerfully declare that "perhaps a headless girl can be imagined humanely./ perhaps this girl will be treated as if she were/ headed...// gonna make me a girl you can't knee press,/ officer. Make her of ground she's already down on.// you can't tell her ‘get down' further if she is/ ground itself." The language throughout is textural, limber, and torrential, suited to be read aloud as White captures the daily struggles faced by women of color. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

In Casual Conversation, White attends to an axiomatic ground in the pagefield. She teaches me something about the collaborative dreaming that we can be. I am saying that there is something for us here in the complex Quiets of this meditative, sustained, and intimately political work. It is something so vital and so unstoppably generative that I can only think to call it unrest.”

—Aracelis Girmay, from the Foreword

“Whether waxing philosophical or poetic or recalling the inner monologues of the human spirit living moment to moment in lifetimes, telling tales of tattling, playing the dozens, or testifying, recalling lynch ropes or racial memory, Renia White’s Casual Conversation is not casual nor conversant in the denouement of passivity, but are rigorously passionate inner monologues—interrogations, perhaps—preoccupied with the human eye, ear, and heart. In her muted Miles-Bearden collaged renderings, White is as bold and brash and confident and causal as a musician, painter, filmmaker stopping us dead in our tracks (as Ntozake Shange reminds us poems should do like a kiss) at such self-assured soliloquies and spirited solos that are ‘just gorgeous.’ Her stilted syntax stutters lead you into the poem slant yet makes you ‘come through the front door.’ In these ‘blue rummage,’ dialectics you marvel at the mastery as White splits the personal wide open for the political (church burnings; confederate flag unlatching; mother-daughter remorse and reckoning) to merge and mingle with your ‘ear to the root’ of her blues: to what matters in her bright and shining ‘hope room’ of a debut.”
—Tony Medina, author of I Am Alfonso Jones and Death, With Occasional Smiling

“Casual Conversation, true to its title, contains poems of such killing nonchalance both in what they say and in the many unsayables finding space in-between memorable line after memorable line. The way Renia White finds and inhabits space is a stellar pushback against erasure and absence. A timely collection by a timeless poet.”
—Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons: Poems

From the Publisher