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Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts Hardcover – April 15, 2020
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Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney’s fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of “docu-poetry.”
The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the “insurgent sensualist,” hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: “I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . .”
The tenderness of a father’s handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl’s fountainhead takes over every page. “One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.
- Print length264 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTriQuarterly
- Publication dateApril 15, 2020
- Dimensions7 x 0.9 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100810142015
- ISBN-13978-0810142015
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A paean to the culture of African Americans and their history and culture of survival through creativity—in your face, loud, emotional, outrageous truth.” —Ed Roberson, author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World
"Finney’s latest book is a blessing for a continuously undone but never destroyed people, reaching into the past to grasp hope and self-worth to sustain their future." —Da'shawn Mosley, Sojourners
"This is a gorgeous, multi-valenced, illuminated exploration into Finney's thickly, rapturously rooted life. A family history that skeins into South Carolina's lore. A queer Black woman poet's purposeful wandering into becoming." —Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio
"Finney’s work is grounded in memory, and she traffics in the trauma and joy implicit in our lives and days. Her poems elide the generational and the personal with ample music. They are, therefore, more than taut with vital details; they are alive with nuance and contrast, where doom is rightfully proximate to creation and grace." —Sewanee Review
"This book. I’ve never read anything like it. That’s a good, good thing." —Kelly Norman Ellis, Blood Orange Review
"Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, the poet’s first new collection in nearly 10 years, demonstrates how Finney continues to push herself and expand our idea of poetry’s scope . . . As in much of Finney’s previous work, she invites us into her vision of race, gender, family, relationship to the land, and love with many long poems worthy of the space. But this collection is different. Part lyrical insurgency, part memoir, part fantasy, it tells us how Finney came to be a poet and shows us the land, people, and artifacts that helped her get there." —Ciona Rouse, Chapter16.org
"Given her career, it is saying a lot that her latest book is, I think, her most remarkable." —David Naimon, Between the Covers
"This book is an astonishment . . . It is an archive of love, the likes of which the 'official archives' have often ignored or denied or, I would say, suppressed. This book reminds us that our eyes, our hearts, our love, our poems, make another archive—awayward archive, to quote Saidiya Hartman—that holds us. That beholds us. An archive in which we are being held and seen by who loves us." —Ross Gay, Sewanee Review
About the Author
NIKKY FINNEY is the author of five books of poetry, including Head Off & Split (Northwestern University Press, 2011), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. Finney has received the Art for Change Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and currently serves as an ambassador for the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Art for Justice Project.
Product details
- Publisher : TriQuarterly (April 15, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 264 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0810142015
- ISBN-13 : 978-0810142015
- Item Weight : 1.7 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 0.9 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,206,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #898 in Black & African American Poetry (Books)
- #2,488 in Love Poems
- #4,223 in Essays (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
"So—you can write pretty," Toni Cade Bambara tells the twenty-one-year-old Nikky Finney during a monthly writing circle that Bambara held in her Atlanta home during the 1980's. "But what else can your words do besides adorn?" This flat-footed question, put to the young poet by the great short story writer, at the beginning of her career, sets her sailing toward a life of aiming her words to do more than pearl and decorate the page. She follows the path, beyond adornment, that Bambara lived and taught—a writing life rooted in empathetic engagement and human reciprocity. Nikky Finney has been a faculty member at Cave Canem summer workshop for African American poets; a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a particular place for poets of color in Appalachia; poet and professor for twenty-three years at the University of Kentucky; and visiting professor at Berea and Smith Colleges. She won the PEN American Open Book Award in 1996 and the Elizabeth O'Neill Verner Award for the Arts in South Carolina in 2016. She edited Black Poets Lean South, a Cave Canem anthology (2007) authored On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), Heartwood (1997), The World Is Round (2003), and Head Off & Split, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry. Her acceptance speech has become a thing of legend, described by the 2011 NBA host, John Lithgow, as "the best acceptance speech ever–for anything." In her home state of South Carolina she involves herself in the day-to-day battles for truth and justice while also guiding both undergraduates and MFA students at the University of South Carolina where she is the John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters, with appointments in both the Department of English Language and Literature and the African American Studies Program, which she proudly notes is forty-six years strong. Nikky Finney's work, in book form and video, including her now legendary acceptance speech, is on display in the inaugural exhibition of the African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C. You will find her in the poet's corner, directly across from Chuck Berry’s 1973 candy apple red Cadillac Eldorado. Finney's work includes the arenas of Black girl genius unrecognized, Black history misplaced and forgotten, and the stories of women who prefer to jump instead of ride the traditional tracks of polite and acceptable society. In her full body of poetry and storytelling, she explores the whispers and shouts of sexuality, the invisibility of poverty in a world continually smitten by the rich and the powerful, the graciousness of Black family perseverance, the truth of history, the grace and necessity of memory, as well as the titanic loss of habitat for all things precious and wild.
The new decade is here and so is Nikky's new book. Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry ( pub date April 15, 2020) is her first poetry collection since winning the National Book Award in 2011. In addition to the poems, there are hotbeds, a horticulture term introducing her readers to her journals, the place where most of her poems have always found their calcium and strong knees. There are also artifacts, images and photographs, that assist the words in composing how the poet's poet-life came to be. Over the last 30 years each and every Nikky Finney book has always been wonderfully different but this long awaited new minglement of word and image crafts a new kind of American poesy.
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The are also poems of national or regional “occasions” of black America, such as the reopening of the Lyric Theater the Black dream house in Lexington. Perhaps the most moving poems are where the autobiographical and national are combined as in “Black Bow with a Cow: a still life” of the youngest boy 14-year-old George J. Stinney to be killed by electric chair with her brother and father in attendance at a hearing for Corum nobis: mistakes. .
Throughout the book is a drive, that we should all aspire for “I’ve been on the hunt for how to have and keep a beautiful mind in the midst of old and new catastrophe ever since I realized a beautiful mind was possible to have”.