Plantains and Our Becoming

Plantains and Our Becoming PDF Author: Melania Luisa Marte
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593471350
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book

Book Description
A rousing, beautifully observed, and tender-hearted debut poetry collection about identity, culture, home, and belonging—for fans of Jasmine Mans and Fatimah Asghar “We, children of plátanos, always gotta learn to play in everyone else’s backyard and somehow feel at home.” Poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte opens PLAINTAINS AND OUR BECOMING by pointing out that Afro-Latina is not a word recognized by the dictionary. But the dictionary is far from a record of the truth. What does it mean, then, to tend to your own words and your own record—to build upon the legacies of your ancestors? In this imaginative, blistering poetry collection, Marte looks at the identities and histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood. Moving from New York to Texas to the Dominican Republic and to Haiti, this collection looks at the legacies of colonialism and racism but never shies away from highlighting the beauty—and joy—that comes from celebrating who you are and where you come from. PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING is “a full-throated war cry; both a request for anointment and the responding bendición” (Elizabeth Acevedo).

Plantains and Our Becoming

Plantains and Our Becoming PDF Author: Melania Luisa Marte
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593471350
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book

Book Description
A rousing, beautifully observed, and tender-hearted debut poetry collection about identity, culture, home, and belonging—for fans of Jasmine Mans and Fatimah Asghar “We, children of plátanos, always gotta learn to play in everyone else’s backyard and somehow feel at home.” Poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte opens PLAINTAINS AND OUR BECOMING by pointing out that Afro-Latina is not a word recognized by the dictionary. But the dictionary is far from a record of the truth. What does it mean, then, to tend to your own words and your own record—to build upon the legacies of your ancestors? In this imaginative, blistering poetry collection, Marte looks at the identities and histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood. Moving from New York to Texas to the Dominican Republic and to Haiti, this collection looks at the legacies of colonialism and racism but never shies away from highlighting the beauty—and joy—that comes from celebrating who you are and where you come from. PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING is “a full-throated war cry; both a request for anointment and the responding bendición” (Elizabeth Acevedo).

Plantains and Our Becoming

Plantains and Our Becoming PDF Author: Melania Luisa Marte
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593471342
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book

Book Description
A rousing, beautifully observed, and tender-hearted debut poetry collection about identity, culture, home, and belonging—for fans of Jasmine Mans and Fatimah Asghar “We, children of plátanos, always gotta learn to play in everyone else’s backyard and somehow feel at home.” Poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte opens PLAINTAINS AND OUR BECOMING by pointing out that Afro-Latina is not a word recognized by the dictionary. But the dictionary is far from a record of the truth. What does it mean, then, to tend to your own words and your own record—to build upon the legacies of your ancestors? In this imaginative, blistering poetry collection, Marte looks at the identities and histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood. Moving from New York to Texas to the Dominican Republic and to Haiti, this collection looks at the legacies of colonialism and racism but never shies away from highlighting the beauty—and joy—that comes from celebrating who you are and where you come from. PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING is “a full-throated war cry; both a request for anointment and the responding bendición” (Elizabeth Acevedo).

Mela

Mela PDF Author: Melania-Luisa Marte
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781729561393
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 78

Get Book

Book Description
Mela is a collection of poetry told as a tale unpacking magic, love, culture, and healing.

Frying Plantain

Frying Plantain PDF Author: Zalika Reid-Benta
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487005350
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book

Book Description
Set in the neighbourhood of “Little Jamaica,” Frying Plantain follows a girl from elementary school to high school graduation as she navigates the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation immigrants experiencing first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity in a predominantly white society. Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle — of her North American identity and her desire to be a “true” Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother’s rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too “faas” or too “quiet” or too “bold” or too “soft.” In these twelve interconnected stories, we see Kara on a visit to Jamaica, startled by the sight of a severed pig’s head in her great-aunt’s freezer; in junior high, the victim of a devastating prank by her closest friends; and as a teenager in and out of her grandmother’s house, trying to cope with ongoing battles of unyielding authority. A rich and unforgettable portrait of growing up between worlds, Frying Plantain shows how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing play can turn to something much darker.

We Are Owed.

We Are Owed. PDF Author: Ariana Brown
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735352763
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book

Book Description
We Are Owed. is the debut poetry collection of Ariana Brown, exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces. Through poems about the author's childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult, Brown interrogates the accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. We Are Owed asks the reader to develop a Black consciousness by rejecting U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and confronting anti-Black erasure and empire-building. As Brown searches for other Black kin in the same spaces through which she moves, her experiences of Blackness are placed in conversation with the histories of formerly enslaved Africans in Texas and Mexico. Esteban Dorantes, Gaspar Yanga, and the author's Black family members and friends populate the book as a protective and guiding force, building the "we" evoked in the title and linking Brown to all other African-descended peoples living in what Saidiya Hartman calls "the afterlife of slavery."

The Shi King, the Old "Poetry Classic" of the Chinese

The Shi King, the Old Author: William Jennings
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chinese poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book

Book Description


What Would Frida Do?

What Would Frida Do? PDF Author: Arianna Davis
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1541646312
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Having doubts about your next step? Ask yourself what artist Frida Kahlo would do in this “beautiful volume . . . sure to inspire” (Boston Globe). NAMED A BEST GIFT BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: Instyle, Oprah Daily, Business Insider, Esquire, Boston Globe, and Redbook Revered as much for her fierce spirit as she is for her art, Frida Kahlo stands today as a feminist symbol of daring creativity. Her paintings have earned her admirers around the world, but perhaps her greatest work of art was her own life. What Would Frida Do? celebrates this icon’s signature style, outspoken politics, and boldness in love and art—even in the face of hardship and heartbreak. We see her tumultuous marriage with the famous muralist Diego Rivera and rumored flings with Leon Trotsky and Josephine Baker. In this irresistible read, writer Arianna Davis conjures Frida’s brave spirit, encouraging women to create fearlessly and stand by their own truths.

Walking Gentry Home

Walking Gentry Home PDF Author: Alora Young
Publisher: Hogarth
ISBN: 0593498011
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
An “extraordinary” (Laurie Halse Anderson) young poet traces the lives of her foremothers in West Tennessee, from those enslaved centuries ago to her grandmother, her mother, and finally herself, in this stunning debut celebrating Black girlhood and womanhood throughout American history. “A masterpiece that beautifully captures the heartbreak that accompanies coming of age for Black girls becoming Black women.”—Evette Dionne, author of Lifting as We Climb, longlisted for the National Book Award Walking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young’s ancestors, from the unnamed women forgotten by the historical record but brought to life through Young’s imagination; to Amy, the first of Young’s foremothers to arrive in Tennessee, buried in an unmarked grave, unlike the white man who enslaved her and fathered her child; through Young’s great-grandmother Gentry, unhappily married at fourteen; to her own mother, the teenage beauty queen rejected by her white neighbors; down to Young in the present day as she leaves childhood behind and becomes a young woman. The lives of these girls and women come together to form a unique American epic in verse, one that speaks of generational curses, coming of age, homes and small towns, fleeting loves and lasting consequences, and the brutal and ever-present legacy of slavery in our nation’s psyche. Each poem is a story in verse, and together they form a heart-wrenching and inspiring family saga of girls and women connected through blood and history. Informed by archival research, the last will and testament of an enslaver, formal interviews, family lore, and even a DNA test, Walking Gentry Home gives voice to those too often muted in America: Black girls and women.

Albion's Seed

Albion's Seed PDF Author: David Hackett Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199743698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 972

Get Book

Book Description
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Lineage of Rain

Lineage of Rain PDF Author: Janel Pineda
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642595284
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 44

Get Book

Book Description
In this spellbinding debut, Los Angeles–born poet Janel Pineda sings of communal love and the diaspora and dreams for a liberated future. Lineage of Rain traces histories of Salvadoran migration and the US-sponsored civil war to reimagine trauma as a site for transformation and healing. With a scholar’s caliber, Pineda archives family memory, crafting a collection that centers intergenerational narratives through poems filled with a yearning to crystallize a new world—one unmarked by patriarchal violence. At their heart, many of these poems are an homage to women: love letters to mothers, sisters, and daughters. Lineage of Rain moves from los campos de El Salvador to the firework-laden streets of South Gate to the riverbanks of England. Pineda’s masterful stroke weaves together these seemingly disparate worlds, illustrating the complicated reality of living as a first-generation student. As the speaker navigates elitism and the violence of the English language, she lays bare their ties to power. And yet, these poems rebel through revel, asking: how do we hold each other tenderly in a world replete with pain and many forms of violence? With dreams made possible through collective struggle, Pineda returns us to the seeds from which we bloom: family, history, and community. All the while, this collection never fails to capture often overlooked moments of joy—the mundane yet monumental—showing the reader that the world we dream is already ours. Through Lineage of Rain, Pineda emerges as a seminal contributor to the canon of Central American diasporic writing.