Karisma Price's stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone "Autocorrects 'Nigga' to Night,'" If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence-"We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood."-but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book "so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious."
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As happinessAs the wailing tambourine that replaced my uncle's guns- SELF-PORTRAIT
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(@sarabandebooks, 30 March 2023, e-book, 92 pages, #ARC from the publisher via @ edelweiss_squad)
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I liked this poetry collection a lot. I'm not black so couldn't completely relate to the poems about black culture, experience and heritage but could relate to the ideas they contained about identity. The poems in the collection are all very personal and I felt like the poet was giving me a glimpse into her most secret heart. I felt privileged to be allowed there. I especially enjoyed Things That Fold, I'm Always So Serious and Ample.
