Maafa

"Do we have any black women in the epic hero position?" Holiday (A Jazz Funeral for Your Uncle Tom) asks in this potent and surprising collection. In wide-ranging, long-lined, critical, and at times darkly comic poems, Holiday reckons with genocide, generational trauma, capitalism, and empire, writing: "the paradise/ we say we love is dread." Through excellent use of enjambment ("We certainly laugh a lot at our own/ witnessing"), each poem offers a political critique that subverts conventional possibilities of what a poem can do, such as when Holiday renders into metaphor an image of fascism at once profound and unsettling--"fascism has a pact with spring"--and answers her own rhetorical question, "What's between a miracle and a nightmare? Whiteness?" Offering a Black, female hero--one who has been refused such status by the norms of society and culture--Holiday delivers poems that are wide-ranging, beautifully subjective, and intensely focused. Holiday's vision, innovation, and skill are gifts to contemporary poetry. (Apr.)

Go forth and tell no one Mandarin oranges straight from the can    pinched like pimp hand zeros (heroes?) I was choking So I ate only soft things    no chewing     choking  on the softening seed of a loose bullet impaling me from my mother's throat Maafa can't breathe the boat to shore Maafa don't study war no more or crosshairs or sparingly Sometimes we call this intention but in her case it's that she's onto the banality of horror She's bored with the angry men their broken livers bending the skin between the brows Into ladders and venture capital This is the end of the beginning of genocide it begins swallowing soft things then pans to Quincy a recorder Edward Kennedy Ellington's steeple chasing him in tented Italian footage of everything but the passage down the canal to level where he calls for notes no more innuendo tell me Black beauty is the most powerful currency in the world  Excerpted from Maafa by Harmony Holiday 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.