Description
Book SynopsisThe latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis,
The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother.
Trade Review“Vievee Francis is, undoubtedly, one of the most compelling poets alive and writing today. In her fourth book,
The Shared World, she charts a course of how entangled all of our lives are in today’s world. Who do we share the world with? Who do we ignore? What does it mean to live so closely in proximity to each other and to have such deeply complicated histories? At the heart of this book is this truth: what is the telling, and how do we go about the ways of doing so? With bravery, Francis peels back the layers, not leaving a simple understanding but instead, by the telling, examining the complications of what it means to tell.” —Fatimah Asghar, author of
If They Come for Us: Poems“When I say Vievee Francis is one of the finest living American writers, I say it without hyperbole. Each of her poems is a revelation. They embody Lorca’s idea that duende is about self-discovery, of excavation through image and the imaginary. Not for the self, but
from the self. Few poets can write with her earned grace.” —Adrian Matejka, author of
Somebody Else Sold the WorldTable of Contents
- To Forget
- A Call to Arms
- Break Me and I’ll Sing
- Finding Myself in the Market of Accra
- Another Attempt at the Telling
- 1965
- The Shared World
- Honey
- Given to Rust
- On the Piney Woods, Death, Bobby Frank Cherry and Me
- The Keening
- The Poets Who Are Our Enemies
- When Your Brother Dies You Want
- I’ve Worn It Three Days in a Row
- Ugly Fruit
- Everything is Berlin
- Dead or Alive, The Rats Ignore Us
- Juneteenth(#3)
- The Smell
- Accidental City
- Provincetown, MA
- You Prefer Us Dead
- Alright, I Am the One You Prefer Dead
- The Quiver Tree
- Marvin Gaye: Mercy
- I Have Been Witness and Victim
- Yes, Among Them
- I’ve Been Thinking About Love Again
- I Know That Music
- Birdsong Like a Child’s
- Marvin Gaye: Sugar
- Uncle Sonny
- Bless the Kindling World
- Brother of Skulls
- Room for One
- Omnivore
- The Fisherman Speaks Again of his Days
- The Lie
- And Upon That Pale Horse a Paler Woman
- Emmett, I said Wait
- The Marsh King
- Without End
- Reading Neruda at 2:00 AM
- The River Shivers as Much as I
- The Winter Kingdom
- Small Reprieve
- To Be Touched as Sophia
- The Sound
- Epiphany: Parable of the Tongue Cut by Strings
- That Cat
- Returns
- The Wheel of the Bus: A Fiction
- Relevance
- An Unkindness Of
- Landscape
- My Dolls Were Just That
- Meat Eater
- Goat Heart
- I Am the Only One I Know Who Can Cook Them
- Br’er Rabbit’s Hole
- What The Fat Man Taught
- Mother Tongue
- Why I Don’t Wait
- The Company of Wolves
- The Shore
- Nouvea Slim
- The Morning I Miss Such Devotion
- Everywhere and Here Too
- Canzone in Blue, Then Bluer
- Muleskinners
- The World Contracts
- Moan Soft Like You Wanted Somebody Terrible
- Cannibal
- In A Lesser Paradise
- Goat
- Fantastica Melancholia
- The Dead Horse
- The Cannibal Myth
- Ota Benga’s Case
- Dark Horse
