Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our exploration of titles from SIU Press that celebrate Black History Month.
Charif Shanahan’s affecting poetry debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing was a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. In this collection, Shanahan confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.” With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection.
Cyrus Cassells’s sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize in 2018 and the Helen C. Smith Award for the Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019, when it was also nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature in Poetry. Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, this collection keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family. The first cycle celebrates the resilience of the rice- and indigo-working slaves and their descendants who have formed a unique Africa-inspired language and culture, and the second explores themes of pilgrimage, love, and loss, concluding with a pair of elegies to the poet’s mother and the many men lost in the juggernaut of the AIDS crisis.
In Smith Blue, Camille T. Dungy offers a survival guide for the modern heart as she takes on twenty-first-century questions of love, loss, and nature. From a myriad of lenses, these poems examine the human capability for perseverance in the wake of heartbreak; the loss of beloved heroes and landscapes; and our determination in the face of everyday struggles. Dungy explores the dual nature of our presence on the planet, juxtaposing the devastation caused by human habitation with our own vulnerability to the capricious whims of our environment. In doing so, she reveals with fury and tenderness the countless ways in which we both create and are victims of catastrophe.
In her third book of poems, Red Clay Suite, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, expresses her familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American South occupies in our cultural lexicon. Her two earlier books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues, use the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma. Now, in Red Clay Suite, Jeffers approaches the southern landscape as utopia and dystopia—a crossroads of race, gender, and blood. These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and complete the last four “bars” of a blues song, resting on the final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation. A later collection by Jeffers was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry.
Find out more about these titles and more on this week's edition of Inside The Blanket Fort.
