The lost songs of Nina Simone

The lost songs of Nina Simone Poems

Shonda Buchanan

Book - 2025

""Nina Simone's ghost lives in these poems by award-winning author, Shonda Buchanan. Like the icon's life and art, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is complex, daring, sensuous, hard and soft all at once." Shonda Buchanan weaves a prism of language, sound and light around and through the life of concert pianist, singer and Civil Rights activist, the incomprehensible Nina Simone. With this book, Buchanan is declaring this The Century of the Black Woman, providing a realistic glimpse into not only Simone's life, but the lives of Black women in America, past and present, and their choices in a myopic, unforgiving country. A grandchild of enslaved Africans, American Indians and Irish migrants, born into poverty as Eun...ice Waymon in a traditionally large family, Nina Simone lived a life few Black American women lived during the Jim Crow era in the South, yet rose to ultimately impact the world with her creative genius and determined spirit. This book is both an emotional and historical excavation of an artist's life, capturing the rise and descent of that life, including Simone's family history, her childhood and young womanhood, as well as the addiction, mental health struggles and abuse. The Lost Songs of Nina Simone embodies the rich legacy --- the pleats between the cloth --- of Simone's artistry, beauty, self-immolation and rage."--Back cover.

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Subjects
Simone, Nina, > 1933-2003.
Simone, Nina, > 1933-2003 > Poetry.
African American women > Poetry.
Race relations > Poetry.
Racism > United States > Poetry.
Civil rights > Poetry.
poetry.
Poetry.
Genres
poetry
Poetry
Published
[Los Angeles, California] : RIZE Press [2025]
Language
English
Main Author
Shonda Buchanan (author)
Item Description
Poems.
Physical Description
111, [7] pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781960018984
  • Author's Note
  • I. The Origin Stories-Forging Things
  • Try on
  • The Alchemy of Rice
  • Mixed Blood Fusion
  • "She too had mixed blood"
  • Low Country Deeds
  • Anointment
  • The Traitor and the Mountain
  • The Origin Stories
  • II. Eunice
  • Eunice
  • Katie's Opus
  • Prophecy
  • Watchnight 1
  • Picture Suite
  • 1. Eunice at 8
  • 2. Lucille
  • 3. Standing
  • 4. Atrophy
  • 5. Daddy Divine
  • 6. The Cartographer
  • 7. Benefactor
  • 8. A Song of Threes
  • 9. Like You
  • 10. You Liked Daisies
  • 11. Mountain Daughter
  • Before the Storm
  • III. Becoming Nina
  • Curtis Institute
  • Preacher's Kid
  • Becoming the River
  • Metamorphosis
  • Carnegie Hall
  • Oh, Liza Jane
  • Porgy
  • IV. The Andy Years (1961-1971)
  • 415 Central Park, Manhattan, Circa 1960
  • Lessons My Future Husband Taught Me
  • Nina's Gilded Wings
  • Drunk
  • Marriage
  • Song of a Man
  • Watchnight II
  • A Baby
  • Faith
  • Lisa's Lament
  • A Daughter
  • Lisa
  • Mule
  • The Andy Years
  • On the Ship
  • V. The Lost Songs of Nina Simone
  • Civil. Right
  • Interview about the South and Me
  • Instructions on How to Make a Gun
  • Sea Lion Woman
  • What I said to Stokely
  • Suite for Martin (Nina's Lament)
  • i. Light
  • ii. Dark
  • iii. Between
  • Liberia
  • Letter to Unmarried Black Girls
  • Drunken Freedom
  • Break Down and Let It All Out
  • Going Home
  • Can't You Hear Me Down Here Prayin'?
  • Space, Time
  • Night Magic
  • Cosmic Flower
  • VI. Epigraph
  • The Singer and the Poet
  • Acknowledgments
  • About the Author
  • Reading and Writing Guide for Teachers
  • About RIZE Press
Review by Booklist Review

The life of legendary singer, composer, and civil-rights activist Nina Simone is creatively distilled in this new collection by poet, memoirist, and educator Buchanan, author of Black Indian (2019). As she writes in her introduction, these poems are both "a case of inquiry . . . and a gesture of adoration." Arranged in chronological sections, the book opens with poetic interpretations of Simone's origin and ancestry, vividly exploring the natural world of her birthplace--"This wet amber of red oak trees, / county grapes and swamp rushes, / boiling sweet Carolina heat"--and giving voice to a selection of Simone's ancestors and family members. This sets the foundation and tone for the rest of Buchanan's rhythmic, immersive bio-poems. Simone is a fully realized presence throughout this volume, as Buchanan follows her coming-of-age as a child prodigy, her battles with mental illness and addiction, and, finally, fulfilling her destiny in becoming a world-renowned singer and advocate for civil rights. An inventive interpretation of a remarkable life.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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