Migration Letters
By M. Nzadi Keita
By M. Nzadi Keita
By M. Nzadi Keita
By M. Nzadi Keita
Part of Raised Voices
Part of Raised Voices
-
$18.00
Apr 02, 2024 | ISBN 9780807008072
-
Apr 02, 2024 | ISBN 9780807008089
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
Invisible Strings
Set Change
At the Louvre: Poems by 100 Contemporary World Poets
Water, Water
Context Collapse
Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics
Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems
Cold Mountain Poems
Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems
Praise
“As if entering a darkroom, Sister M. Nzadi Keita has entered the silences surrounding Black working-class migrants, transforming their lives, and carved that quiet, steady living into photographs. We see their journeys out of Southern kitchens and sawmills to Philadelphia homes and churches, newly integrated schools, resonant Civil Rights trauma, and college campuses. Into these disregarded interiors, her poems breathe air.”
—Sonia Sanchez
“How do we make a city with a name like ‘Philadelphia’ work for us when Philadelphia makes it hard for our blue-collar fathers to go to work? Migration Letters is a book of poems that has at its heart the question of cognitive dissonance in Black people who survive, participate, and thrive in an America they cannot fully trust.”
—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
“Keita has given us a long-breath song of Black witness, missed kisses, and love’s labors lost, longed for, and remembered. Migration Letters summons life from clay and concrete and loam, reconfigures it into lyric, stanza, testimony.”
—Jabari Asim, author of Yonder
“With a wonderfully discerning focus on the lives of working-class Black Americans, Nzadi Keita’s Migration Letters [is] beautifully imagined, carefully considered. This collection, page by page, develops an elaborate portrait of a place and a people during the last sixty years. Though set in Philadelphia, these poems will compel all readers to reflect upon their upbringings, as well as on the intricate puzzle of elements that shaped and sustained their lives. With language that is both lyrical and unflinching, Migration Letters recalls the jagged, somewhat miraculous journey that each of us has taken.”
—Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto
Table Of Contents
THE IDEA OF ANCESTRY
102.
[Far]
50.
[Migration Letter]
153.
[Fathers]
27.
[night shift/day shift]
45.
[Libations for the One Hundred Years of Gwendolyn Brooks]
to your heart
to your journey
173.
[Migration Letter]
69.
[Mentor as a young woman: tanka for Sonia Sanchez]
54.
[A House Full]
195.
[Migration Letter]
7.
[Our Day Will Come]
Seasons
Christening
Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier said what you couldn’t say.
AN AGONY. AS NOW.
129.
[Letters To Eleanor]
34.
[1963]
70.
[white lie]
205.
[Not Your Philadelphia: August, 1964]
107.
[Ebony Magazine]
War
To the photographers
Diaspora
156.
[Toni Morrison Knows]
74.
[16th and Erie]
105.
[by 1989]
9.
[Letter to the Soul Singers: Lou Rawls,
Aretha Franklin, Koko Taylor, Ruth Brown,
Brook Benton, Nina Simone, B.B. King, Otis Redding
& James The-Godfather-of-Soul Brown]
THAT WE HEAD TOWARD
111.
[Letters to Black Bodies]
Integrated Morning
Integrated Afternoon
Blue Plastic Clothesline
“Fence Walk”
25.
[Presentable]
11.
[The Hansberry Suite]
Afterword to Ruth
Afterword to Walter Lee
Afterword to Travis
Beneatha Writes to Herself
57.
[Holes]
85.
[Eunice on 194th]
6.
[Norristown]
13.
[Korvette’s, 1967]
16.
[Kimiko, 1961]
109.
[Great Migration Pentimento]
Perry County
Mike
Jo
Stetson East
siddity
86.
[Eunice by heart]
99.
[House Wedding]
HOMECOMING
29.
[Green Shades Outside the Tropicoro Bar]
38.
[Migration Letter]
213.
[Letter to Melvin Butler, 1965]
233.
[Letters to Mt. Airy, West Side]
240.
[Jones Beauty Shop]
189.
[American ode]
23.
[multiplied]
87.
[Eunice in flight]
117.
[East Chelten Avenue]
300.
[Easter]
18.
[6966 Weatham Street, 1968]
184.
[Letters to the First-Gen North]
DANCING ON THE SHORE
329.
[No way the whole world is white.]
66.
[Holiday magazine on the sofa]
67.
[“What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)?”]
311.
[Just American kids]
345.
[Letter to Nina Simone]
344.
[Cannabis]
321.
[Hendrix, Once]
19.
[Set for Chaka Khan]
Yvette
Chime
273.
[WDAS-FM, 1977]
215.
[Penn Relays]
212.
[Set for Pharoah Sanders]
Bus Ride
Chant
174.
[Ode to Sandalwood]
223.
[assimilation]
302.
[American Innocents]
312.
[Laughing with Don Belton]
78.
[Steel Pulse sings me a dream-letter]
304.
[You Didn’t Pay for That]
122.
[Migration Letter]
Notes
Acknowledgments
Gratitude
21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read
Just for joining you’ll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.
Find Out More Join Now Sign In