Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems

by Nikki Giovanni

Overview

“One of her best collections to date.” —Essence

Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea is a tour de force from Nikki Giovanni, one of the most powerful voices in American poetry and African American literature today. From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in 2010, Giovanni’s poetry has influenced literary figures from James Baldwin to Blackalicious, and touched millions of readers worldwide. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061978975
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/06/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	463,398
File size:	404 KB

About the Author

Nikki Giovanni, poet, activist, mother, and professor, is a seven-time NAACP Image Award winner and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, among many other honors. The author of twenty-eight books and a Grammy nominee for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, she is the University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea
Poems and Not Quite Poems

Possum Crossing

Backing out the driveway
the car lights cast an eerie glow
in the morning fog centering
on movement in the rain slick street

Hitting brakes I anticipate a squirrel or a cat or sometimes
a little raccoon
I once braked for a blind little mole who try though he did
could not escape the cat toying with his life
Mother-to-be possum occasionally lopes home ... being
naturally ... slow her condition makes her even more ginger

We need a sign POSSUM CROSSING to warn coffee-gurgling
neighbors:
we share the streets with more than trucks and vans and
railroad crossings

All birds being the living kin of dinosaurs
think themselves invincible and pay no heed
to the rolling wheels while they dine
on an unlucky rabbit

I hit brakes for the flutter of the lights hoping it's not a deer
or a skunk or a groundhog
coffee splashes over the cup which I quickly put away from me
and into the empty passenger seat
I look ...
relieved and exasperated ...
to discover I have just missed a big wet leaf
struggling ... to lift itself into the wind
and live

Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea
Poems and Not Quite Poems. Copyright © by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Particularly in light of the recent deaths of June Jordan and Gwendolyn Brooks, readers might well look to Giovanni as spokeswoman for the black experience. And, at times, she captures it, effectively representing "all the women who said Baby, Baby, Baby I know you didn't mean to lose your job...I know you didn't mean to gamble the rentmoney I know you didn't mean to hit me." A recent poem, "Have Dinner with Me," written after the World Trade Center collapsed, is a modern masterpiece. Unfortunately, too many of these poems, though themselves strong, seem intent on rehashing the 1950s political climate. And the "Not Quite Poems" predominate. These proselike pieces include childhood memoirs that draw the reader clearly into her experiences, and there is a delightful spoof on what the movie of Harry Potter should have been, but elegiac tributes and political diatribes fare less well. "I keep trying to learn something new so I can share what I am learning," she writes in a letter-poem to a convict on death row. While the effort is to be praised, she too often comes up with insights readers have absorbed a long time ago. For larger collections.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

One of her best collections to date.” — Essence

“An embracing, uplifting, and sustaining voice.” — Booklist

From the Publisher

One of her best collections to date.

Essence

An embracing, uplifting, and sustaining voice.

Booklist

An embracing, uplifting, and sustaining voice.

Booklist

One of her best collections to date.

Essence