Black chameleon Memory, womanhood, and myth

Poet Mouton (Newsworthy) combines family history and personal storytelling in this lyrical memoir. Her prose crackles as she fuses fables with stories to create a spirited portrait of Black American womanhood. Mouton recounts her early aptitude for wordplay, describing her sharp wit at age five and the punishments that often accompanied it: "I got it honest, this tongue. This way to weave words into something more than a masterpiece of theater." Her stories feature goddesses, divinity, and Black womanhood as she recounts her mother swapping out church-approved clothing for "a golden-mustard kaftan draped over kitten-heeled Jesus sandals," her seventh-grade picture day request of straightened hair just like the girls on magazine covers, and her musings on how she was formed (comparing her legs to the Egyptian Goddess Hathor's "powerful thighs" and contemplating the Sumerian creation story of Ninti). Throughout, Mouton honors and complicates her heritage while seeking to understand her place within it: " would tell you that this is why you must work twice as hard to get half as much. But I know that half is not the holy grail. Tell a half-full belly that it is satisfied and see how it grumbles. I did not come from the wombs of half-baked women." The writing is unconventional and exquisite, and sure to enthrall readers of Jesmyn Ward. (Mar.)

Houston's first Black poet laureate weaves mythology and magic into a genre-bending memoir. Mouton remembers sitting on the porch of the Poetry Foundation when a butterfly perched on a fellow poet's skin. When the poet smiled and said that Mexican mythology identifies butterflies as visiting ancestors, Mouton thought about her enslaved ancestors' separation from African mythology, which should have been her birthright. "When have Black people in the Americas," she asks, "had the time to create a history outside the one they were just trying to survive? And in the few moments we get to dream aloud, who is there to record our origins beyond a whitewashed dictation?" These questions drive Mouton's memoir, in which she uses incidents from her personal history to create a new Black, female mythology. For example, in one chapter, a memory of sexual harassment leads to the myth of Acirema, a god of White supremacism whom Mouton kills but ultimately cannot vanquish. After the author chronicles how her weight prevented her from enjoying multiple amusement park rides, she writes an alternative reality in which her body is too powerful for the park to contain, which she follows with a myth she tells her daughter about how the graceful movement of her female ancestors' curvy bodies allowed them to save the children of a plantation from hungry alligators: "The waves were rising and falling to the motion of their hips. This hypnotism was the perfect way to stop the gators." At best, the book is lyrical, tender, and generous, celebrating the beauty of the oppressed with wildly imaginative and artfully rendered prose. Some of the devices--such as referring to the writer's past homes with mythical names, like the Empire, the City of Angels, and Space City, instead of their actual names--feel overly dramatic. Overall, though, this innovative mix of myth and nonfiction is a pleasure to read. A formally inventive celebration of Black womanhood. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.