Monica A. Hand
(USA)
I’ve known rivers and fire
after Nancy Morejón
Never known Coral Island
or River Senegal
still know sea is home.
Remember wreck:
striking, breaking, sinking,
drowning in green algae;
know the beaches of Atlantic,
Far Rockaway; know fire —
tenements burning
like crops of sugar cane;
hear sounds, I write,
knowing their meaning.
Feet and torso, like yours,
move to the rumba, swing low.
Monica A. Hand © 2014
South
Tara House sits on a hill
reminder of back doors
yellow throat’s south
white sycamore ash
magnolia skull oak belly
barely visible south
flying carp and blue
ships cruising south
banked at the river
cross bones wave
no longer shallow
sea shrines burned
a woman’s contralto
deep sorrow south
Monica A. Hand © 2014
…these sites of denigration and violence
have become sites for tourism
— James Early, Smithsonian Institution
Landmark
See there,
where grief lingers where flesh
became an obsession, drunk;
the way the ocean stunk, as if
land marked with stinky flesh
could bare the consuming.
Monica A. Hand © 2014
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Monica A. Hand is the author of me and Nina, (Alice James Books, 2012), short-listed for the 2013 Hurston Wright Legacy Award and finalist for the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year. Her poems have been published in Oxford American, Spoon River Poetry Review, Black Renaissance Noire, The Sow’s Ear, The Wide Shore, Drunken Boat, American Creative Writers on Class, and Beyond the Frontier, African-American Poetry for the 21st Century. A Cave Canem Alum, she has a MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and currently, she is a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Missouri- Columbia.
me and Nina
« Monica Hand’s me and Nina is a beautiful book by a soul survivor. In these poems she sings deep songs of violated intimacy and the hard work of repair. The poems are unsentimental, blood-red, and positively true, note for note, like the singing of Nina Simone herself. Hand has written a moving, deeply satisfying, and unforgettable book. »
— Elizabeth Alexander
http://alicejamesbooks.org/ajb-titles/me-and-nina/
“The message in the so-sick-it muse ic is all on the cover, O’Jays style. The bills are pressing but this book (a We) can help you (Now!) gain a stamp of heritage, your own postal traveling shoes, in the office of International (if not Domestic) Acceptance especially if the real tradition, a mature Langston Hughes in a hat, frames your introduction.”
— Boston Review
fiercely illuminated by declaration and song
— Terrance Hayes
EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE