Blood Memory - Colleen J. McElroy (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Blood Memory.  Colleen J. McElroy.  Pitt Poetry Series.  University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, PA.  2016.

Can a joyous shout still be a protest?  Blood Memory tells us that it can.  Colleen J. McElroy makes it so.  Poems like McElroy's "Lessons in Deportment" will teach you almost everything you need to know.

Today's book of poetry is over seven-hundred blogs/reviews into this project and we are still subject to being totally amazed.  Awed.

Colleen J. McElroy has mastered voice.  These tear-blinding and immaculate poems are damned near perfect.  Voice and place, McElroy, like the very best film directors has mastered mise en scene.  Having set flawless stages her characters simply tell their stories and we believe every word.

Sunday Best

before Aunt Jennie joined Visitation

Catholic Church I walked Mama

to Lane Tabernacle CME and settled her

in a pew next to Aunt Ethel

the two of them demure in small

pancake hats with fragile veils

among the grand feathered hats of the ladies

who hid a week's worth of bad hair earned

in hot kitchens or sweaty laundries

the ladies of Visitation were all but hidden

in stained glass windows incense and stations

of the cross, their dresses as dull as nun's habits

at Lane Methodist Mama and her sister

sat together their heads tilted toward each other

hats pinned to clouds of kinky white hair

around them ladies in gingham and worn coats

fanned away the heat that had kept them all week

in white kitchens or scrubbing office floors

all week they had been no more than

wallpaper seen and never heard

come Sunday when they sang Amen, feathers

and flowers nodded along with them

when I was older I went with Aunt Jennie

to mass at Visitation, rosary beads matching my dress

on my head a white lace handkerchief pinned

into my curls, my missal white to match

around me ladies of various hues cradled

their rosaries and echoed a prayer of redemption

come Sunday we were all of the same cloth

women who sought to be what we dreamed

💫💫💫

Reading Colleen J. McElroy taught Today's book of poetry a new way of looking at his long dead father and allowed us to see him in a kinder light.  That's some trick.  That's a good trick.

Good poetry will do that to you; take you places you've never been, teach you things you didn't know were missing.

Blood Memory is an astonishing collection that will resonate with Today's book of poetry for a long time.  These poems are good enough to take an entitled and aging, old and cranky, sad white man, and for a moment, we got to see the world from the joyous eyes of innocent youth.  There are layers and layers of white privilege weighing down on these poems yet McElroy's world is peopled with strong, strong women helping each other abide.

Today's book of poetry doesn't see many books like Blood Memory, a book dedicated to how intelligent young Black women endure and grow.  In Blood Memory strength is gathered, cultivated and nurtured in the hands of an elaborate matriarchal maze.  Blood Memory affirms our belief that great poetry can come from any source, whether it is the lessons learned while grooming natty hair or the pride/fear confused emotions about the first Black cop in St. Louis.

Precocious

my mother is angry with me

I am barely four just young enough

to get on the bus for free

but my mother is angry with me

when I read aloud the bright

placards curved high

above the bus windows

I read aloud the placards

asking us to buy nothing

that is free and my mother

grows angry as I read

everything I can barely see

I want to tell her letters

go all mushy melting together

before my very eyes

but my mother is angry

when the bus driver tells her

she must pay for me since

children who are truly young

can not read the ads they see

my mother yanks my collar

tells me sit be still

you'll ruin your eyes

reading everything you see

she threatens to put me

in school a year before

I'm ready and I smile

my mother frowns and asks

what will become of me

if I insist on reading

every little thing I see

💫💫💫

Our morning reading was lovely.  The Today's book of poetry staff doesn't always come to a consensus with our poetry choices but Colleen J. McElroy had us all close ranks, come together, and celebrate as one.  Didn't matter who was doing the reading; these poems bounced around our offices like they were purely electric and everyone got shocked.

Consensus is rare enough, enthusiastic consensus is another.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, and Maggie, our newest intern, found Blood Memory touched them to tears.

They weren't alone.

The Answers to Why

because her daughter, Claudia, had babies while Mama

was still having babies    family lines blurred

mothers and daughters waltzing just out of reach

because her daughter, Jennie, turned Catholic

Mama took me to Lane Methodist each Sunday

because a photographer penciled an outline

around Mama's cottony hair Jennie studied

tinctures and rouges and one-eyed camera could find

because she could not read Mama memorized

all the songs in the hymn book

the communion wine tasted like grape juice

because Mama fed me from a bowl that read: find the bottom

I ate my vegetables sipped pot liquor while she sang old time songs

spoon to mouth: Ol'Dan Tucker too late to git his supper

because Mama's fingers grew thick in winter

I learned to braid her hair

because Mama got too old to do fine work as she called it

I became her eyes to thread needles and pick loose hems

I made sure the white butcher didn't put his thumb on the scale

because my mother, Ruth, worked at Fort Leonard Wood

Mama taught me how to cook

what's a Leonardwood? I asked

because my mother opened mornings like a can of beans

fussing and cussing and quoting Shakespeare

between dammit-I'll-bite-you and scrambled eggs

because Mama said my mother was moody and needed help

I watched my mother paint fake stocking seams down her legs

shapely as Betty Grable   high heels clicking on the linoleum

heading to the door   factory head scarf tied neat as a Sunday hat

because we had afternoons alone Mama taught me

how to knead bread dough the proper way — knuckles down

because Mama singed her eyebrows when the pilot light

went out Papa bought a brand new stove

I missed the old stove and its stand-up oven

because Papa said none of his girls would do day help

I read the papers and dialed the telephone for Mama

because Papa died on the train coming home from California

Mama sat by the window all day and wouldn't talk

because Claudia had become a widow before Papa died

my mother and her sisters fought to get Mama's attention

because Mama said the four poster was too big

after Papa died I slept with her

in the same bed she'd birthed babies who lived

and those who didn't

I counted angels carved in the chifferobe door

because a spider bit me the first night I slept

in the four poster Mama propped me on pillows

so I wouldn't roll onto the blister on my back

because Mama covered the bite in goose grease

there was no trace of the spider come morning

because the chifferobe held Papa's shaving basin

and shoes I spent hours inspecting the little shelves

because Mama put plugs in the locks of Papa's

roll top desk and chifferobe I always had a way out

because Mama said there were two places

she wouldn't want to be: hell and west Texas

we lived in that railroad house on Kennerly for years

because Mama didn't trust white people after the Klan

shot the mules dead in front of the old family house

because after they moved to Missouri Mama said she saw

ghosts walking the long hallway that banked the house

because she said it so much I thought I saw them too

and my mother said don't talk about the old ways Mama

because my mother worked long days I learned Mama's stories

because Mama lived in the past when Papa was alive

and lived every day when he wasn't she couldn't stop

because my mother caught Mama telling me stories

of the time before Lincoln freed us my mother argued

but Mama said she had to tell me what was just because

💫💫💫

It has been a long, long time since Today's book of poetry posted a "list" poem but Colleen J. McElroy's is a cake stealer.  McElroy is now on our radar and will be celebrated by us when Today's book of poetry talks poetry.

Today's book of poetry lives for the pleasure of sharing poetry with you readers, today it is an honour.

Colleen J. McElroy will help inspire a new generation of poets.

Colleen J. McElroy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Colleen J. McElroy is professor emeritus of English and creative writing at the University of Washington. She is the former editor in chief of the literary magazine Seattle Review and has published numerous poetry collections, most recently Here I Throw Down My Heart. Her latest collections of creative nonfiction include A Long Way from St. Louie and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar. She has received a PEN/Oakland National Literary Award, the Before Columbus American Book Award, two Fulbright Research Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships (in both fiction and poetry), a DuPont Visiting Scholar Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship.

BLURBS

"There is much to admire in Blood Memory, from the general impulse to preserve a family against the onslaught of time to the details of this particular African-American family in the twentieth-century heartland, to McElroy's style, at once spare and dense with incident and observation."
—The Potomac


“She is the last woman of her line. Her new poems end and begin with A. Phillip Randolph and Pullman Porters, her enjambments are Ma Rainey and Lawdy Miz Clawdy, her leading men are the last Black men on the planet named Isom, her major planets are porches and backroads. She is still the master storyteller to the 60 million of the Passage. When I didn't know how to be a poet, I first read Colleen McElroy to slowly walk the path to how.”
—Nikky Finney

“There is music in her memory—a music of prayer. Moon. Stars. A music of generational flesh. Revered. Remembered. A testimonial to family that startles us with its beauty. And blood. ‘Frozen in time as if with the next breath they will reveal everything under that mask.’ Thank you, my dear sister, for our rescued memory.”
—Sonia Sanchez

An Interview with Colleen J. McElroy, author of Here I Throw Down My Heart

Video:  Bill Kenower

upress.pitt.edu

726

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Blue Hallelujahs - Cynthia Manick (Black Lawrence Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Blue Hallelujahs.  Cynthia Manick.  Black Lawrence Press,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2016.

"we don't choose what haunts us"

                                                                                               from Mind the Gap

Today's book of poetry can tell you that these poems are declarations, prayers, confessions and pleas, all of them vividly feminine and highly charged.  Cynthia Manick's Blue Hallelujahs is a strong woman's voice telling the stories of young girls, young women and old women too.  These are stories that don't see the light of day often enough.  Even though women read and write more poetry than men - men publish more poetry than women.  

Manick wrings joy out wherever she can find it and like her grandmother's kitchen, these poems will bring you that "slow applause under the skin."  Tyehimba Jess suggests that Blue Hallelujahs is necessary music for getting to the other side.  Today's book of poetry certainly felt the tug.

Mind the Gap

Little E wants a smile like mine,

teeth with a gap so wide

a corn husk and tugboat

could pull through.

Or a submarine, lost sounds

and grunts. Tiny light bulbs

if you're careful or a string

of Christmas lights looped

through like garland.

Does she know how the world

works? How some of us

are born without 40 acres

and the weight of a mule

on their chest. Like my mother

and Monday mornings --

boarding the F train and two buses

with two children, her own negro

caravan. A sonata full of low-watt

clinics and hurling vowels

like swords. How I often waited

in those long-ass lines

and imagined myself a boy,

a whirlwind digging in the muck

where only muscles and gold matter.

My tongue tries to reason with her

ring against the want -- cause

we don't choose what haunts us.

When I was young I craved closed

spaces, bright veneers, the smile

of Rudy Huxtable or on bad days

Shirley Temple. No one notices

a mouth when Bojangles is dancing.

...

Today's book of poetry is uncertain of how to address the obvious so feels compelled to say it - these poems are about a young Black woman and her experience of the world and I'm an old white man, so how could I possibly relate?  Is that an unreasonable question?  Cynthia Manick does all the work bridging that gap by writing poems that are wide open and crystal clear.  The strong women in these poems are familiars and we admire their unrelenting belief that the world is changed with every strong foot put forward.

Manick's poems are confident and certain, powerful meditations on family, gender, childhood and race.  Today's book of poetry enjoyed that Manick employs an innocent sense of wonder in her voice from time to time in these excellent poems.  Resilience is rare enough but adding wonder gives these poems additional charm.

Manick is comfortable with adding some smolder to her plate.  These poems are cradle to the grave stories about family for good and bad, but when Manick warms the sheets that all fades to the shadows.  Cynthia Manick captures the primal and caresses it with subtle sweetness.

Recipe for Consummation

Your seasoned skin --
            one quart Egyptian
            the shade of balsa honey,
            one part Cubano
            with a dash of cayenne pepper,
            and one half buttered South--
is a scratch 'n sniff insert
more savory than Old Spice
            or Sara Lee;
and I claw it nightly
like oranges or sand
to whispered chants
           of sweet meat sweet meat
and bareback tongues
            in our bedroom,
until shuck sheds
            like a coiled rope
            of dark stars.
I drink it down
pelvic-deep,
            so that my body
            remembers
            the brown bounty
of your herbs and spine
in the morning.

...

Blue Hallelujahs has its share of righteous indignity, these poems are never shrill or pained but they certainly are sharp and pointed when Manick puts her foot down.

Another great morning read at the Today's book of poetry offices.  The sun is shining in our town this morning which is a treat, we've had snow nineteen of the last twenty-five days.  We all took turns reading Cynthia Manick's Blue Hallelujahs until there were none left to read.

When I Think of My Father

I live in constant fear of extinction,
that I'll be pulled back to muddy toes
and pear trees. Praised for wide hips
and a silent mouth that wants
to scream, echo, grunt, but can't.

Or that I'll meet a man just like my daddy,
tether my back to his name like a spine
where each cord holds large teats filled with children
and more children like little benign tumors.
And when he slips his hand under my skirt
I'll know he doesn't love me -- just the malleable
skin that's spreads north and south,
guided by his un-mutable compass.

When I think of my father I can only see
my mother at her knees, chanting he's gone
Cyn, he's gone, pairs of discarded
blue jeans on the floor, my mother
fingering the silver buckles like a totem
to lure him back --
from some other woman's scent.

She silently demands my twelve-year old
self to hold and rock her body
like a pair of marsupials -- her rooting
my chest for safety, me exposed to the cold
air of their bedroom. I try to be stone,
brine the carnage in my throat
swallow her overripe voice of muscadines.

Falling into the bodies of baggy pants
boys at corner stores -- their pockets
full of candy and cake. What they don't
give me, I steal. What I steal, I eat.
I eat to fill a gangrene hole stuffed with bills,
deeds in my father's name, blocks
of state-issued butter and cheese.

I want to take a blade and cut
the edge of this round red wound.
Have daughters born not ready
to fear, but ready to pick up a spade,
dig a ditch, and knife a man.

...

Today's book of poetry has nothing but esteem for the voice of Cynthia Manick.  I wish her strength on all our daughters and sisters.

Blue Hallelujahs is Cynthia Manick's first book of poetry, it's as powerful as it is promising.

Cynthia Manick

Photo:  Sue Rissberger

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, Cynthia Manick has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves as East Coast Editor of the independent press Jamii Publishing and was a 2014 finalist for the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has appeared in African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, DMQ Review, Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Sou’wester, Pedestal Magazine, Passages North, St. Ann’s Review, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

BLURBS
The speaker of Cynthia Manick’s haunted debut collection admits “a love for surgery porn at 1 a.m.” And one early poem begins, “Today I am elbow deep/in some animal’s belly//pulling out the heart and stomach/for my mother’s table.” Throughout, Blue Hallelujahs approaches aspects of a woman’s development—from “feet first” Caesarean delivery to a grandmother’s admonition “to pull flesh/from the throat not the belly”—blade at the ready, moving from slaughter to surgery to a kind of deep southern haruspication. At the center of girlhood we find The Shop with its inventory of inherited hungers. “Is this what the heart eats?” Manick renders visceral a longing to avoid extinction, to escape the museum, to live fully embodying one’s identity as a woman who “knows/ how to wield a knife.”
     —Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award Finalist

"What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and "animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars." In Blue Hallelujahs Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words."
     —Nikky Finney, Author of Head Off & Split, Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

Cynthia Manick's Blue Hallelujahs bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor's "white-toothed love coils on repeat." Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick's reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a "slow applause under the skin." Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side.
    —Tyehimba Jess, author of leadbelly, winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series

Hunted 2

Black Poets Speak Out

Cynthia Manick

blacklawrence.com

552

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.