"I" New and selected poems

Toi Derricotte, 1941-

Book - 2019

A Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. In Derricotte's own words: "How do you gain access to the / power of parts of yourself you / abhor, and make them sing / with beauty, tenderness, and compassion? / This is the record of fifty years / of victories in the reclamation / of a poet's voice."

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Subjects
Genres
Poetry
Published
Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Toi Derricotte, 1941- (author)
Item Description
A Publishers Weekly Spring 2019 Announcements: Poetry, Top 10 Selection.
Physical Description
xxi, 298 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780822945666
  • Preface to the New and Selected Poems
  • Speculations about "I"
  • After all those years of fear and raging in my poems
  • After the Gwendolyn Brooks reading
  • Among school children
  • As my writing changes I think with sorrow of those who couldn't change
  • Biographia Literaria Africana
  • Blessed angels
  • Elegy for my husband
  • The enthusiast
  • The exchange
  • Gifts from the dead
  • Glimpse
  • Black woman as Magician at CVS
  • The most surprising and necessary ingredient in my mother's spaghetti sauce
  • Bad Dad
  • Glimpse
  • I count on you invisible
  • I give in to an old desire
  • The intimates
  • The intimates
  • On a woman who excuses herself from the table, even in restaurants, to brush her teeth
  • Homage
  • Jerry Stern's friendship
  • La fille aux cheveux de lin
  • Lauds
  • Midnight: Long Train Passing
  • My rather in old age
  • A nap
  • New Orleans palmetto bug
  • 1. False Gods
  • 2. Why the giant palmetto bugs in New Orleans run toward you when you are screaming at them to go away
  • Note
  • Pantoum for the Broken
  • The Peaches of August
  • The permission
  • The proof
  • Rereading Jerry Stern
  • Sex in old age
  • Streaming
  • Summer evening at Still Point
  • Telly redux: Sharon asks me to send a picture of little fishie Telly
  • Watching a roach give birth on You Tube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God
  • "What are you?"
  • The Empress of the Death House
  • Sleeping with mr. death
  • The story of a very broken lady
  • The mirror poems
  • The face/as it must be/of love
  • Doll poem
  • New lady godiva
  • The Grandmother Poems
  • The Empress of the Death House
  • The Feeding
  • The Funeral Parade
  • From a group of poems thinking about Anne Sexton on the anniversary of her death
  • Unburying the bird
  • Natural Birth
  • Introduction: Writing Natural Birth
  • November
  • Holy cross hospital
  • Maternity
  • 10:29
  • Transition
  • Delivery
  • In knowledge of young boys
  • Captivity
  • The Minks
  • Blackbottom
  • Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
  • St. Peter Claver
  • The Weakness
  • Fires in Childhood
  • High School
  • Hamtramck: The Polish Women
  • The Struggle
  • Before Making Love
  • On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings
  • Stuck
  • Squeaky Bed
  • The Good Old Dog
  • The Promise
  • For a Man Who Speaks with Birds
  • Touching/Not Touching: My Mother
  • My Father Still Sleeping after Surgery
  • Boy at the Paterson Falls
  • Fears of the Eighth Grade
  • The Furious Boy
  • In an Urban School
  • The Polishers of Brass
  • For the Dishwasher at Boothman's
  • Plaid Pants
  • Books
  • Allen Ginsberg
  • On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses
  • A Note on My Son's Face
  • Tender
  • Preface
  • Tender
  • Exits from Elmina Castle: Cape Coast, Ghana
  • The Journey
  • The Tour
  • Tourists' Lunch
  • Beneath Elmina
  • Above Elmina
  • Slavery
  • Power
  • Market
  • When My Father Was Beating Mc
  • Black Boys Play the Classics
  • Brother
  • Family Secrets
  • After a Reading at a Black College
  • For Black Women Who Are Afraid
  • Passing
  • Bookstore
  • Invisible Dreams
  • Two Poems
  • Peripheral
  • Bird
  • 1:30 A.M.
  • Dead Baby Speaks
  • The Origins of the Artist: Natalie Cole
  • From a Letter: About Snow
  • Not Forgotten
  • Grace Paley Reading
  • Clitoris
  • The Undertaker's Daughter
  • Preface to The Undertaker's Daughter An apology to the reader
  • Part I. The Undertaker's Daughter
  • I am not afraid to be memoir
  • Beds
  • The undertaker's daughter
  • Sunday afternoon at Claire Carlyle's
  • Dolls
  • Mistrust of the beloved
  • Part II. A Memory of the Future
  • I see my father after his death
  • My dad & sardines
  • The new pet
  • The Telly Cycle
  • For Telly the fish
  • Special ears
  • Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly
  • On the reasons I loved Telly the fish
  • Because I was good to Telly in his life, An apology to Telly the revolutionary
  • When the goddess makes love to me
  • Untitled
  • The night I stopped singing like Billie Holiday
  • When I touched her
  • A little prayer to Our Lady
  • Cherry blossoms
  • Part III. The Undertaking
  • The exigencies of form
  • The undertaking
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Derricotte (The Undertaker's Daughter), writer and cofounder of the Cave Canem Foundation, is a seminal figure in the American poetry community. Drawing from five previous books spanning over four decades, this retrospective volume unflinchingly explores the author's complex experiences as a light-skinned black woman in America. "For years, to avoid conversations that would take/ a lifetime, minds purposely dulled for generations/ ('Single consciousness,' Dubois might have called it),/ I would say when introduced-to avoid later embarrassment/ For us both-I'm Toi Derricotte, I'm black, and stick my hand out." Poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Anne Sexton, as well as artists and performers such as Natalie Cole, Billie Holiday, and Alice Neel appear throughout the collection. In raw, confessional poems, the speaker chronicles the abuse she experienced at the hands of her father, as well as the graphic, stunning and powerfully feminine experience of a natural childbirth. Derricotte's attention lingers on places of struggle where life is at its most vibrant, urgent, and surprising: "to hold that pain/ until it writes a poem, to hold it/ for years until you learn both the holding and the writing." (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The blessed angels   How much like angels are these tall gladiolas in a vase on my coffee table, as if in a bunch whispering.  How slender and artless, how scandalously alive, each with its own humors and pulse.  Each weight- bearing stem is the stem of a thought through which aspires the blood-metal of stars.  Each heart is a gift for the king.  When I was a child, my mother and aunts would sit in the kitchen gossiping.  One would tip her head toward me, "Little Ears," she'd warn, and the whole room went silent.  Now, before sunrise, what secrets I am told!--being quieter than blossoms & near invisible.   Excerpted from I: New and Collected Poems by Toi Derricotte All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.