Negotiations -- I too sing America -- Harambe for president (2016 write-in ballot) -- Prime time -- The 400-meter heat -- Emeritus -- Elegy for the man on highway -- The art of cannibalism -- Found art -- Ode to my body -- Auto-immune -- Failed avoidance of 'the body" in a poem -- Her -- Fable -- A history of dolls -- Macular conception -- Spilled milk -- Scope -- My rapist once said he didn't need anything from me -- My rapist taught me the proper way to cook bacon -- My rapist explained even the water company gets a bill -- Hypervigilance -- Love poem with Stockholm -- Seeing my rapist reminds me there was no Latin word for "volcano" -- My therapist tells me I keep dating my mother -- Lodestar -- The way I listen to you read poems -- Love poem that ends at popeyes -- Long division -- Ode to my penis -- Pact -- Pandemic -- Pickle goddess -- and though the odds say improbable.
Summary:
"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"-- Provided by publisher
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.