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Overview
Winner, 2022 Georgia Author of the Year (Poetry)
Finalist, 2023 Kate Tufts Discovery AwardGumbo Ya Ya, Aurielle Marie’s stunning debut, is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. These poems are loud, risky, and unapologetically rooted in the glory of Black gxrlhood. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black gxrl dies “by the barrel of the law” or “for loving another Black gxrl.” Part familial archival, part map of Black resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogs the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with punching cultural commentary and a poetic voice that holds tenderness and sharpness in tandem. It asks us to chew upon both the rich meat and the tough gristle, and in doing so we walk away more whole than we began and thoroughly satisfied.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780822966661 |
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Publisher: | University of Pittsburgh Press |
Publication date: | 09/21/2021 |
Series: | Pitt Poetry Series |
Edition description: | 1 |
Pages: | 120 |
Sales rank: | 878,869 |
Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from “transhistorical for the x in my gxrls” What I mean is, this country is mine if only because from my mouth I spit its loam and unspun a noose. I won’t exploit the only metaphor they gave us willingly, and instead hunt for other vicious things to make a muse. I earned this country. I owe it nothing. With my infinite, infant hand, I manipulated a death sentence into a compound-complex one. from the umbilical, I bled a life worth writing down and in a century’s time, there will be another word created still for the weeping magic of this same story: a Black gxrl’s first breath.
Table of Contents
Notes & acknowledgments 1
I
What had happened 11
Gxrl gospel i 13
Portrait of rage with caution tape & bullhorns 15
War strategies for every hood 17
I, too, sing america 19
No name in the street 20
Gxrl gospel ii 22
Grxl gospel iii 25
Transhistorical for the x in my gxrls 26
& not by sight 32
II
The creek behind my childhood home was one of those small heavens 35
& what is a heaven without a god to break it 36
Some of the men we love are terrorists 37
Father-son & holy 38
Unholy ghazal 40
Yes, i am done with the god of white men 41
Grxl gospel iv 43
Transhistorical and i observe the Sabbath like a ill verse 45
Independent 47
Listen, 48
A poem of failures 50
Held like arsenic in each of my kin's mouths 52
CPT or lessons in god-timing 56
III
Gumbo ya ya 61
IV
Pantoum for aiyana 75
Georgia me 77
Like a freedom too strange to be conquered 79
Thottin on fountain drive 81
The world between me is gender 84
Transhistorical for the men we love 85
Filé 87
Egungun 89
Wayward experiments 90
This poem is a hex, tread light 92
Psalm in which i demand a new name for my kin 95
In the event i become some unrecognizable beast 97
More notes 101
Acknowledgments 105