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    the black maria
    the black maria
    the black maria
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    the black maria

    By Aracelis Girmay

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    About this ebook

  • Girmay's previous BOA title Kingdom Animalia won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and has been a consistent leader in sales, selling more than 3,500 copies since 2011.

  • In 2015, Girmay was honored with a Whiting Award in Poetry, a prestigious award that carries a $50,000 prize.

  • With the recent rise of national attention to racism, white supremacy, and media tags like #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe, this collection is a timely and necessary look at historical and current realities of blackness within the U.S.

  • Human Rights reports estimate that over 20,000 people have died at sea making the journey across the Mediterranean from North Africa to southern Europe in the past two decades. This collection focuses, in part, on this international crisis. In order to write these poems, Girmay researched international law around immigration, immigration rates, and the pressures that push people to attempt these crossings even at the height of astonishing risk.

  • This book carries with it a short film project that incorporates portraiture, collage, and archival footage against a sonic backdrop of Albert Ayler’s “Water Music.” The film means to conjure a “memorialistic” tone that illustrates diverse relationships/juxtapositions of black bodies and bodies of water. The short film will be available online.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateApr 18, 2016
    ISBN9781942683032
    the black maria
    Author

    Aracelis Girmay

    Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the GLCA New Writers Award, and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Girmay is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry. She teaches in Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry.

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    • 5/5
      Graceful…. Englightening….ProfoundThese are the words that came to mind when I finished this dazzling poetry collection whose poems which at times were intimately personal and other times outraged at injustices in the world.I was immersed in this collection as these poems whispered in my ear, touched my heart, and soothed my spirit.Words like these had me reflecting on the deeper meaning of the written thoughts:“if there were angels, they would be flieswho hover over our privacies,kissing us with their mouthsthat have kissed other wounds.”

    Book preview

    the black maria - Aracelis Girmay

    prayer & letter to the dead

    The typewriter hammers out

    the end of its ribbon,

    as you, one by one,

    go & go & go,

    outlasted,

    by memory,

    by ink,

    the patience

    of the paper

    where the dark words buck

    like fish in air.

    I, The Living.

    Which is

    my portrait?

    The right hand

    bleeding the page

    for its marrowmarks

    or the silence my left hand

    inherits?

    -

    While the room is still

    dry here,

    while the page is still

    white, still here,

    more shore than sea, more still

    than alive, while the air is now

    touching the dark & funny fruit of

    your eyebrows where it is quiet enough

    for me to hear the small sighing

    of your shoes lift up into

    the old & broken boat,

    while the small hands of water

    wave, each one waving

    its blue handkerchief, then

    the gentle flutter of luck

    & tears. We all know

    what happens next. Do not go.

    But if you must,

    risking what you will, then,

    in a language that is my first

    but not your first, & with what I know

    & do not know, I will try to build

    a shore for you here, a landing place, here

    where the paper dreams

    that you will last. Our parents

    & our grandparents taught

    us: in the school of dreaming,

    the discipline of dreaming.

    It is my work: to revise & revise,

    even as you are filling my eyes, now,

    & you are filling the sea (Courages).

    & the fishermen drop their veils

    into your grave.

    -

    The sea delivers

    your letters, the reams of paper,

    the ink & messages

    & shells telling us goodbye.

    Goodbye, you say,

    to them, to that, goodbye,

    to the city in which for lunch, for dinner,

    we ate the moon, its theater of faces,

    its sweater factory, the cathedral

    bells ringing stoically above a fit of sparrows,

    the cafés whose doorways seem to weep, now,

    with the red & amber weeping of beaded curtains through which

    the months blow in & out, invisibly

    as months, as old men.

    Goodbye your somewhere where

    the President stands in uniform

    wearing a peacock, pinned-alive,

    to his chest. Through

    his binoculars he sees this & that, approving, disapproving.

    He does not understand the degrees of love.

    The difference between your love for

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