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| Photo by Rachael Eliza Griffiths |
My dear friend Nikky Finney's new book Head Off &Split 
will be released February 1. I've announced the arrival of friends' books here in the past but I am so very thrilled about this one. Anyone who knows Nikky knows she works hard, she thinks about the world hard. She holds the world up to our eyes and makes us see it for all its dirt and guts and beauty. Flinch if you want to but it's coming anyhow. If you've read her work, she's done it to you before in On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice and The World is Round. But this book, her fourth volume, takes the sacred personal, the regional and the universal to a new Finney level. Heart, gristle, blood, guts, bone. It's all there between these pages. Go see for your self and pre-order a copy.
will be released February 1. I've announced the arrival of friends' books here in the past but I am so very thrilled about this one. Anyone who knows Nikky knows she works hard, she thinks about the world hard. She holds the world up to our eyes and makes us see it for all its dirt and guts and beauty. Flinch if you want to but it's coming anyhow. If you've read her work, she's done it to you before in On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice and The World is Round. But this book, her fourth volume, takes the sacred personal, the regional and the universal to a new Finney level. Heart, gristle, blood, guts, bone. It's all there between these pages. Go see for your self and pre-order a copy.I announced it in a previous blog but again : These are the best poems that Nikky has ever written. This is the best book that Nikky has ever written. All I can say is GET READY!
The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president's final State of the Union address.
Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.
Artful and intense, Finney's poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.
Those of you who will attend AWP will see her at "The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World" panel with Lauret Savoy, Elmaz Abinader, Faith Adiele, Fred Arroyo & Debra Kang Dean.
Each week (or so up until the Feb. 1 HO&S drop deadline) a new video will be released for our viewing pleasure where you will see several of the poems from the collection come alive. Watch for them on YOUTUBE or look for them here.
Her new website is also very beautiful check it out here.
My Dear Friend Chryssy, you know I don't blog, but I love what you are doing here, saying here, so much. The electronic 21st century is pulling me in -- dreadlock by dreadlock -- so I must respond to what you have just posted. I had to write in. Had to thank you for taking the time to alert the high seas about this coming book that means so much to me. As artists we may write in the sweet gray lonely fog of morning but that is not where we live, not where we open out mouths, in order to absorb the juice of life, the juice that takes us back to the solo page to do more work, hopefully better, more honest, necessary work. Truth be told, we artists live with our arms outstretched for moments like these. We live in hopes that we matter, that we, our work, will connect with a face, a voice, a heart, a hammering pencil, over there and way over there too. I have not been very good at standing on any soap or grapefruit box and saying to the passing crowd, "Here! Let me share with you what I have. " But that is all in the past now. As Jimmy Baldwin instructed us many years ago, I have taken my"Inventory at 52." That inventory has instructed me, with the birthing of this book, to sing, to sing, to sing out. Thank you again for starting the concert that is about to begin.
ReplyDeleteKeep singing Nikky. We hear you! Thanks for dropping by.
ReplyDeleteCrystal, what a great blog. I'm glad I found your work, and thanks for introducing us to a great poet. I'm going to buy all of her work. Also didn't know you had this much work out there. http://joycespoems.blogspot.com
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