What Had Happened Was

Therí Alyce Pickens (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

96 Seiten

2025
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-2828-4 (ISBN)

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In her debut poetry collection, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling, crafting and questioning the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be.

In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Li’l Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Travelling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.

Therí Alyce Pickens is Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana at Bates College and author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, also published by Duke University Press, and New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States.

This
On This Day 2
The Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death 3
On March 12, 2020, Breonna Taylor 5
On Losing; A Hypothesis 6
Customary Calculus for Chronicity 7
Getting Dressed 9
Depression, Jacob Lawrence, 1950 10
If Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t had his heart attack 11
Remember the episode of Bones when 12
Ode to Checking My Shit 13
Anatomy of Soap 15
my lover says (my mind) 17
I found out I have something 18
Ursa Corregidora and Mary J. Blige Contemplate Life without Children 19
That
Dispatches from the Pediatric Floor 22
Collar Is What Hangs around the Neck 23
I am watching a documentary about food, again 25
Corona Poem 26
T 27
On sex 28
Palimpsestina 29
The Amateur Gardener Contemplates Trauma 31
Apostrophe to Inspiration 32
Chronically Ill 34
On recompense 35
I tell her some of her ancestors must have snitched on Harriet Tubman 36
What You Don’t See When Ben Vereen Guest Stars as Will’s Father on The Fresh Prince, May 1994 37
Mind You
What Had Happened Was 40
& The Third
Variation on a Theme 56
Potential Ode or Elegy Out My Window 57
Neighborhood Watch 58
Coming Home 59
Ranunculus 61
It was just before Thanksgiving 62
June, 1018 63
Ursa Corregidora Goes to Junior High in the 1990s 64
Some Suicide Are Slow 65
I got into a Twitter beef with Lolo Jones over a blind white girl 67
What Cliff Should Have Told Theo on the Pilot of The Cosby Show, September 1984 68
Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Simon Godwin, National Theatre, 2019 70
my lover says (he doesn’t remember) 72
I meet a man with a stutter 73
Let Me Holla at You Right Quick; or Notes 75
I Ain’t Forgot about Y’all; or Acknowledgments 81

Erscheint lt. Verlag	28.3.2025
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	178 x 254 mm
Gewicht	572 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4780-2828-9 / 1478028289
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-2828-4 / 9781478028284
Zustand	Neuware