III. Winter. Baptism (Flatwoods, Kentucky, 1972) -- Cousin -- Black Rapunzel -- Asking about My Mother -- The Water Witch on Salvation -- The Water Witch on Invasion -- The Water Witch on Reading -- O Tobacco -- The Visit -- Dig If You Will the Picture -- Slow Dance -- The Creek -- II. My Father Was a City -- Beyond the White Canvas -- August 9, 1974 -- Wet Nurse -- The Bath -- Dropsy -- Death March -- Dear Johnny P -- Mother's Day -- Bones -- Ole Fashioned -- Black Farmer -- Press -- Dirge -- Black Body -- A Meditation on Grief -- On Being Country -- III. Bloodroot -- Kitchen Ghosts -- Snow Falls like a Scorned Woman's Tears -- Black & Fat & Perfect -- Witness -- Coming of Age -- Dance -- Homestead -- Heritage -- Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts -- Motherland -- Winter.
Summary:
"From the foreword: "In Perfect Black, Crystal Wilkinson walks us back down the road she first walked as a girl, wanders us through the trees that lined the road where she grew up, where her sensibilities as a woman and a writer were first laid bare. In one of the first poems that opens the collection she is a woman looking back on her life, on the soil and mountains that first stamped the particular sound of her voice and she is deeply inquisitive about how it all fell into place: "The map of me can't be all hills & mountains even though I've been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two." Perfect Black is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this black writing girl's body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. We read and we hold on too.""-- 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.