DaMaris B. Hill brings power to BREATH BETTER SPEND: Living Black Girlhood

 

Be prepared to rage, sing, cry, and learn from this new hybrid collection Breath Better Spent (Bloomsbury) from one of the most powerful voices in the USA today. Dr. Damaris B. Hill writes about unspeakable atrocities as in "Kamille 'Cupcake' McKinney," a Black child stolen at a birthday party, and the complicity of local law enforcement, ending with "judge slapping his knees has a pocket full/ of opiates and promises for the young girl/ kneeling under his dinner napkin" (p. 87). Hill pulls together stories of Black womanhood, from the opening inscription to Zora Neale Hurston to Whitney Houston to Aretha Franklin ("What You Talkin' Bout") to her own younger self. The result is a book-length tour-de-force. This book deserves a wide audience, especially in times when the Senate hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson expose the blatant racism of some of the highest USA elected representatives. Thank you, Dr. Hill, for this testament to strength.

DaMaris B. Hill, PhD, is the author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, an NAACP Image Award Finalist; The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland; and a collection of poetry, \Vi-ze-bel\ \Teks-chers\(Visible Textures). As with her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. An Associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky and a former service member of the United States Air Force, she lives in Kentucky. www.damarishill.com Advertising & Promotions0 TOC0

Book Launch of Runaway Pony, poets respond to paintings by Tom Weso, 7 p.m. Sat. Nov. 17, 603 Tenn. St., Lawrence, KS

RUNAWAY PONY: An Anthology of Verse after Paintings by Thomas Pecore Weso is a collection of “ekphrastic poetry,” poems written about specific artworks. The collection commemorates an opening and reading at the Runaway Pony Bed and Breakfast, November, 2012. The vivid, acrylic and black-light paintings of Weso inspire diverse, award-winning authors, including:  

Diane Glancy, Julianne Buchsbaum, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Xánath Caraza, Silvia Kofler, Denise Low, DaMaris B. Hill, Allison Serina Hearn, James Benger, and Kevin Cummings.

Critic Mick Braa writes of Thomas Pecore Weso’s paintings: “He paints mostly bright, high-contrast colors to records what he has discovered, borrowing styles and figures from varied Indian art traditions to symbolize what he sees senses, and learns. Forms can switch back and forth between foreground and background, perhaps illustrating our constantly changing sensations of place, spirit and things in between.”  (Lawrence Magazine 2012)
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Nikky Finney wins 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

Poetry winner of the National Book Award is Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split,  from TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press. My friend Damaris Hill had been telling me to read Nikky Finney for a couple years, and so I did. Her work is tough and strong. The poem “Sign Language, “ from The World is Round (Innerlight Publishing, 2003), shows the vivid, visceral images she uses—here, the image of two hearts torn out of two lovers’ chests. She addresses the reader directly—no safe distances here—with “tell me what is the difference.” This is unforgettable.

SIGN LANGUAGE
For the man who jumped out in front of the woman with his
arm raised like a machete screaming Abomination! as she
walked the streets of San Francisco holding her lover’s hand
for the first time in public.

There is a woman who goes to sleep
every night wishing she had broken
your sternum reached up inside your
chest momentarily borrowing your
heart to hold before your screaming
face and with her other hand still
clutching her lover’s broke next into
her own sternum plucking next her
own heart dangling them both there
sterling silver sign language for you
tell me what is the difference.
Finney is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky and lives in Lexington. She’s also on the faculty at Cave Canem, the writer’s center for African-American poets, and a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets. She was born in Conway, S.C. an educated at Talladega College and Atlanta University. Writes Walter Mosely, “She has flung me into an afterbirth of stars and made my stiff bones as loose as jelly.” Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison notes, Finney “calls us to consider and value again the blessings found in community, the strong bonds of family and the transcendent and inexplicable ways of the spirit.” Her narrative poems include characters as diverse as Jacques Cousteau and Saartjie Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), young women defined by violence and old women killing time in a thrift store.