I: New and Selected Poems

by Toi Derricotte

Overview

Winner, 2020 Frost Medal
Finalist, 2019 National Book Award
Honorable Mention, 2020 BCALA Literary Awards

Toi Derricotte’s story is a hero’s journey—a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. “I”: New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.
 
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822986775
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/26/2019
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	986 KB

About the Author

Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter and four previous poetry collections, including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is cofounder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Read an Excerpt

The blessed angels
 
How much like
angels are these tall
gladiolas in a vase on my coffee
table, as if in a bunch
whispering.  How slender
and artless, how scandalously
alive, each with its own
humors and pulse.  Each weight-
bearing stem is the stem
of a thought through which
aspires the blood-metal of stars.  Each heart
is a gift for the king.  When
I was a child, my mother and aunts
would sit in the kitchen
gossiping.  One would tip
her head toward me, “Little Ears,”
she’d warn, and the whole room
went silent.  Now, before sunrise,
what secrets I am told!—being
quieter than blossoms & near invisible.
 

Table of Contents

Contents Preface to the New and Selected Poems Speculations about "I" After all those years of fear and raging in my poems After the Gwendolyn Brooks reading Among school children As my writing changes I think with sorrow of those who couldn't change Biographia Literaria Africana Blessed angels Elegy for my husband The enthusiast The exchange Gifts from the dead Bad Dad Glimpse I count on you invisible I give in to an old desire On a woman who excuses herself from the table, even in restaurants, to brush her teeth Homage Jerry Stern's friendship La fille aux cheveux de lin Lauds Midnight: Long Train Passing My father in old age A nap 1. False Gods 2. Why the giant palmetto bugs in New Orleans run toward you when you are screaming at them to go away Note Pantoum for the Broken The Peaches of August The permission The proof Rereading Jerry Stern Sex in old age Streaming Summer evening at Still Point Telly redux: Sharon asks me to send a picture of little fishie Telly Watching a roach give birth on YouTube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God "What are you?" The Empress of the Death House sleeping with mr. death the story of a very broken lady the mirror poems the face/as it must be/of love doll poem new lady godiva The Empress of the Death House The Feeding The Funeral Parade from a group of poems thinking about Anne Sexton on the anniversary of her death unburying the bird Natural Birth Introduction: Writing Natural Birth november holy cross hospital maternity 10:29 transition delivery in knowledge of young boys Captivity The Minks Blackbottom Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing St. Peter Claver The Weakness Fires in Childhood High School Hamtramck: The Polish Women The Struggle Before Making Love On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings Stuck Squeaky Bed The Good Old Dog The Promise For a Man Who Speaks with Birds Touching/Not Touching: My Mother My Father Still Sleeping after Surgery Boy at the Paterson Falls Fears of the Eighth Grade The Furious Boy In an Urban School The Polishers of Brass For the Dishwasher at Boothman's Plaid Pants Books Allen Ginsberg On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses A Note on My Son's Face Tender Preface Tender The Journey Tourists' Lunch Beneath Elmina Slavery Power Market When My Father Was Beating Me Black Boys Play the Classics Brother Family Secrets After a Reading at a Black College For Black Women Who Are Afraid Passing Bookstore Invisible Dreams Bird 1:30 A.M. Dead Baby Speaks The Origins of the Artist: Natalie Cole From a Letter: About Snow Not Forgotten Grace Paley Reading Clitoris The Undertaker's Daughter An apology to the reader PART I. THE UNDERTAKER'S DAUGHTER I am not afraid to be memoir Beds The undertaker's daughter Sunday afternoon at Claire Carlyle's Dolls Mistrust of the beloved PART II. A MEMORY OF THE FUTURE I see my father after his death My dad & sardines The new pet The Telly Cycle For Telly the fish Special ears Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly On the reasons I loved Telly the fish Because I was good to Telly in his life, An apology to Telly the revolutionary When the goddess makes love to me, Untitled The night I stopped singing like Billie Holiday When I touched her A little prayer to Our Lady Cherry blossoms PART III. THE UNDERTAKING The exigencies of form The undertaking Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

This retrospective volume unflinchingly explores the author’s complex experiences as a light-skinned black woman in America. . . . Derricotte’s attention lingers on places of struggle where life is at its most vibrant, urgent, and surprising.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
 


“What song do you sing when you sing ‘so low we can't hear you?’ Toi Derricotte makes poetry of that song. It rises from ‘the houses where you hear the least squealing,’ it is ‘quieter than blossoms & near invisible.’ It is filled with witness and love for our literal and literary families.” —Terrance Hayes
 


“No writer I know of explores with more honesty the sorrows and wonders and joys and shames and tenderness of being alive. No writer is more tender. And no poems I know of make me feel witnessed, held, beheld, the way Derricotte’s do. Her poems behold us. I am so grateful for these poems. I am so grateful for Derricotte’s beautiful heart.” —Ross Gay, author of Be Holding
 


“These exceptional new poems reveal one of America's strongest and most ardent poets mid-strife, on fire, charging forward toward all that is false in our lives and in our world. How endlessly grateful I feel that, once again, she has allowed us to accompany her.” —Robin Coste Lewis
 


“The new poems in Toi Derricotte’s collection ‘I’ reveal that she has entered an entire new sphere as a poet, in which the struggles fall away and the spirits take her hands and float her forward. After years of wrestling with her demons, Derricotte has awakened—enlightened, serene, truth coming to her, through her, so casually. She has earned this grace with all her hard work, suffering and love.” —Alicia Suskin Ostriker, author of The Volcano and After
 

“Buy this book for cold dark winter months when you need to be held by a few words. No one can do that quite like Derricotte.”

—LitHub

“In this new and selected collection, Derricotte writes with her characteristic candor and grace. And Telly! Telly! Telly the goldfish, ‘his swishy tail a magisterial emblem / of the Living God.’ The ‘i’ of these poems is not afraid to love a goldfish, not afraid to write that love into poems full of trusting sincerity and deep connection. She knocks me out every time.” —Camille Dungy, Orion

From the Publisher