Negotiations: Poems

by Destiny O. Birdsong

Overview

"Full of wonder." —Elizabeth Acevedo

A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and Entropy Magazine

What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body—a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity—both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951142131
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	10/13/2020
Pages:	152
Sales rank:	544,571
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and won the Academy of American Poets Prize, Naugatuck River Review’s 2016 Narrative Poetry Contest, and Meridian’s 2017 “Borders” Contest in Poetry. She earned both her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt University, and now lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Negotiations 3

I too sing america 9

Harambe for President (2016 Write-In Ballot) 15

Prime Time 19

The 400-Meter Heat 21

Emeritus 23

Elegy for the Man on Highway 52 25

The Art of Cannibalism 29

Found Art 34

Ode to my body 37

Auto-Immune 41

Failed avoidance of "the body" in a poem 43

Her 47

Fable 53

A history of dolls 58

Macular Conception 60

Spilled Milk 62

Scope 65

My rapist once said he didn't need anything from me 68

My rapist taught me the proper way to cook bacon 70

My rapist explained even the water company gets a bill 73

Hypervigilance 77

Love Poem with Stockholm 78

Seeing my rapist reminds me there was no Latin word for "volcano" 80

My Therapist Tells Me I Keep Dating My Mother 87

Lodestar 89

The way i listen to you read poems 91

Love poem that ends at popeyes 93

Long Division 96

Ode to my penis 100

Pact 105

Pandemic 108

Pickle Goddess 120

And though the odds say improbable 122

Acknowledgments & Notes 125

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/21/2020

Birdsong debuts with an extraordinary string of immaculate, brutal narratives about systemic violence and racism, and their repercussions for Black American women. Her linguistic structure is kinetic and eclectic, with moments of macabre spectacle: “I want you to rot,// piece by piece, with everyone you know unwilling// to enter the room—not because they love you,// but because they just can’t take the smell,” as well as intrinsic dread: “your body is all asymptotes and fractals.// your own skin splinters in the dark/ from its dense heat. the pieces// come back together under a halo of prescriptions/ steeping your head in yellow light.” Birdsong seamlessly shifts narrative perspectives, tones, and syntax, skillfully controlling enjambment and white space. Despite grim motifs, her work harnesses levity through sardonicism, riveting diatribe, and unromantic resilience: “I am destined to infuse/ survival with meaning,” she writes, inviting the reader to “feel powerful enough to translate each ache/ into inquiry.” Birdsong’s striking imagery and contagious fervor are a potent salve against apathy and foreboding. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Destiny O. Birdsong is a phenomenal poet. . . . Negotiations signals the arrival of a voice we should all be paying attention to, one that thoughtfully and purposefully broadens our thinking about the interiority of Black women’s lives."

Bitch

"Negotiations is made rich by its natural complexity, with few stones left unturned—poems address silencing, fetishization, tokenism and cultural appropriation with fierce honesty, the sum of which amount to an artfully written love letter to Black women in America. In Birdsong's debut, every angle of the self is worthy of recognition."

Willamette Week

"Stunning. . . . A powerful paean to Black womanhood—to resilience, and, especially, triumph."

Refinery29

"The 34 poems in the volume are extremely readable, so much so that it’s tempting to rush through them. Don’t. Take your time. Ease into these poems. They’re worth it."

The Nashville Scene

"Reading Negotiations is like grabbing a piece of metal so cold it feels like fire in your palm. . . . A collection that is equal parts pain and power."

Josh Cook

"Exquisite. . . . Birdsong’s poems bring the heart and the heat."

Book Marks

"Negotiations is an intimate, stunning collection. Destiny O. Birdsong’s poems examine systems of power and oppression, violence, complicity. These poems are desire, survival, the body, rage, vulnerability. A fierce celebration of black womanhood."

Jaquira Díaz

"Birdsong’s poems reveal the ways that so many borders—nation, race, gender—are structured to maintain hierarchies of allegiance and care. . . . The emergencies of the present are scored through with the fault lines of the past. Birdsong’s poems transform as they touch."

The Paris Review

"The terms of Destiny O. Birdsong’s Negotiations are scalding and tender. . . . Birdsong excavates a national history and her speaker’s personal histories, tracks how their intersections and aftermaths wreak havoc in the woman who survives. But Birdsong’s Negotiations endgame is not simply survival—it aims to flourish."

Donika Kelly

"Destiny O. Birdsong’s striking debut poetry collection explores complicity, rebukes systemic racism and hate, and celebrates the lives of Black women."

GOOP

"Radiant and vital. . . . It’s a collection best read slowly, and then again."

BuzzFeed News

"Reading Negotiations is like walking into a boxing match with an indefatigable fighter; you will be struck, and it will hurt. But for all of its ferocity in how it grapples with womanhood, sexuality, assault, and race, this collection is also full of wonder. Of forgiveness. Of tenderness, the like of which, ultimately, delivers the most powerful sucker punch."

Elizabeth Acevedo

"The splintered chorus of the poems’ speakers heal themselves, feed themselves, love themselves; become their own lovers as they re-negotiate their relationships to self. Birdsong writes her body and the bodies of Black women before and alongside her inside out—bones, viscera, blood at the back of the throat—to arrive at a transcendence of Black women’s bodies beyond sites of violence."

The Rumpus

"Remarkable."

Entropy Magazine - Best Poetry Books of 2020 - 2021