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A TOP TEN NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK ONE OF
BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Astonishing... A great
work infused with love and honesty' Alice Walker, author of The
Color Purple 'Deeply moving... it is magnificent' Sarah Winman,
author of Still Life 'A remarkable work' Afua Hirsch, author of
Brit(ish) 'Epic... It just consumed me' Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Book
Club 'The kind of book that comes around only once a decade'
Washington Post A breath-taking debut novel that chronicles the
journey of generations of one American family, from the centuries
of the colonial slave trade to our own tumultuous era The great
scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in
America, and what he called 'Double Consciousness,' a sensitivity
that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since
childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois's words all
too well. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle to feel like she
belongs, made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well
as the whispers of women - her mother, her sister and a maternal
line reaching back two centuries - that urge her to succeed in
their stead. Ailey decides to embark on a journey through her
family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of
ancestors - Indigenous, Black, and white - in the deep South. In
doing so she must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of
oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and
resilience that is the story - and the song - of America itself.
Sweeping, compulsive and deeply moving, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du
Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers is set to be one of the most talked
about books of the year. LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR
FICTION * SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
* LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN LITERARY PRIZE New York Times 10 Best
Books of the Year * Time 10 Best Books of the Year * Washington
Post 10 Best Books of the Year * People 10 Best Books of the Year *
Booklist 10 Best First Novels of the Year
In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley
published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about
African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen
years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning
writer Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of
Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with
her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and
her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are
poems about Wheatley's "age"-the era that encompassed political,
philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic
slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley's relationship
to black people and their individual "mercies" is foregrounded, and
here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a
human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on
history.
Tanella Boni is a major African poet, and this book, The Future Has
an Appointment with the Dawn, is her first full collection to be
translated into English. These poems wrestle with the ethnic
violence and civil war that dominated life in West Africa's Ivory
Coast in the first decade of the new millennium. Boni maps these
events onto a mythic topography where people live among their
ancestors and are subject to the whims of the powerful, who are at
once magical and all too petty. The elements-the sun, the wind, the
water-are animated as independent forces, beyond simile or
metaphor. Words, too, are elemental, and the poet is present in the
landscape-"during these times / I searched for the letters / for
the perfect word." Boni affirms her desire for hope in the face of
ethno-cultural and state violence although she acknowledges that
desiring to hope and hoping are not the same.
Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday
speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into
song. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the
"shared 'blue notes, ''' as an important intersection between the
secular and the divine, and between the various African American
vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone,
part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty,
moving from the personal to the collective experience. This
movement is often accomplished through the use of personae,
concentrated here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical
figures of Hagar and Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic
scene, a slave ship, or Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak
to the soul of experience.
In her three previous, award-winning collections of blues poetry,
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers has explored themes of African American
history, Southern culture, and intergenerational trauma. Now, in
her fourth and most accomplished collection, Jeffers turns to the
task of seeking and reconciling the blues and its three movements -
identification, exploration, and resolution - with wisdom. Poems in
The Glory Gets ask, "What happens on the road to wisdom? What now
in this bewildering place?" Using the metaphor of "gets" - the
concessional returns of living - Jeffers travels this fraught yet
exhilarating journey, employing unexpected improvisations while
navigating womanhood. The spirit and spirituality of her muse, the
late poet Lucille Clifton, guide the poet through the treacherous
territories other women have encountered and survived yet kept
secret from their daughters. An online reader's companion will be
available.
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Red Clay Suite (Paperback)
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers; Series edited by Jon Tribble
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R658
Discovery Miles 6 580
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In her third book of poems, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers expresses her
familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American
South occupies in our cultural lexicon. Her two earlier books of
poetry, ""The Gospel of Barbecue"" and ""Outlandish Blues"", use
the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma. Now, in
""Red Clay Suite"", Jeffers approaches the southern landscape as
utopia and dystopia - a crossroads of race, gender, and blood.
These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and
complete the last four ""bars"" of a blues song, resting on the
final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation.
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