Aspirate a note, a sounding in a silo entombed beneath wet sand where indigo, salt, sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice preserve a desperate hybrid crop.
Mouth organ at midnight. One woman supine, another quadrilles—all blush crinoline and caramelized curls—in a swamp: what slithers and steams, moss.
Antiseptic sun, bleached-bone sheets twist in the first stirrings of a storm held offshore by a single, vibrating chord as the laundress digs for clams in the shoal, starlit and moon-dark.
As I was writing "Grimoire," Black folk music dominated my playlist: zydeco ballads and creole lullabies. Several of the collection’s poems stage conversations with the past: forgotten recipes, haunted landscapes, personal legacies, or cultural histories. “Fiddle (A Duo)” concludes the first section; it is a lyric cipher, a pivoting hinge or portal, for what comes next. The fiddle’s vibrations form a subterranean soundtrack and the line breaks hint at the instrument’s curves.
"When Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old poet from Los Angeles, took to the stage on Wednesday, it was immediately clear why the new president had chosen her as his inaugural poet. Gorman echoed, in dynamic and propulsive verse, the same themes that Biden has returned to again and again and that he wove throughout his inaugural address: unity, healing, grief and hope, the painful history of American experience and the redemptive power of American ideals."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"One verse in particular left me unsatisfied with my translation: 'pasan bajo el calor de mi ventana' became 'pass beneath my sweltry window.' 'Sweltry' is a weighty word, and I imagine the nuns suffering under their frocks in the Caribbean heat, but 'calor' remits to human warmth, even tenderness, those things—like the smell of used books and towels and the entangled scent of incense—that are of the flesh."
