Destiny O. Birdsong

FictionPoetry

Forest of Noise

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

Fresh on the heels of his debut collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, the Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is a dispatch from Gaza and a call for peace while there is still time to save his people. Abu Toha’s poems describe life in Gaza before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and the result is a harrowing but powerful account of surviving a genocide.

Forest of Noise begins with a tribute to several childhoods: those of Gazan children currently living under constant bombardment, and of Abu Toha himself, who recalls seeing a helicopter shooting a rocket into a building at 7 years old. The rest of the collection performs a similar act,  looking back while recounting the atrocities of the present and, at times, offering glimpses of an unknown and potentially catastrophic future. In “A Request,” written in response to a poem by the late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, Abu Toha hopes for a “clean death,” one where he is not buried under rubble or disfigured by shrapnel, and where the clothes in his closet remain intact for his burial. Other “after” poems, like “After Allen Ginsburg” and “Who Has Seen the Wind [after Bob Kaufman]” rewrite the chaos of other turbulent historical moments in an attempt to make sense of the present. And yet, there are pockets of stillness and quiet reflection. In “Palestinian Village,” the speaker reclines in a peaceful town without conflict. The scene is beautiful, but the idyll is fleeting. By the collection’s final poem, “This is Not a Poem,” imagery collapses in a litany of dismembered limbs. “This is a grave,” writes Abu Toha, “not / beneath the soil of Homeland, / but above a flat, light white / rag of paper.”  

Forest of Noise is a difficult but necessary read. As good poetry often does, these poems will keep you up at night and will require you to ask some of the most difficult questions of our time: What kind of world are we living in? What kind of world are we leaving to the children?

As good poetry often does, Forest of Noise will require you to ask some of the most difficult questions of our time: What kind of world are we living in? What kind of world are we leaving to the children?
FictionPoetry

Bluff

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

Danez Smith’s fourth book of poetry, Bluff, is a robust and inventive read, with poems ranging from essayistic to wordless. (One piece, “METRO” is a QR code that takes readers online to over two dozen pages that didn’t make it into the printed collection.) Bluff begins with a personal query: Has the poet betrayed their community by making art about Black pain? This is a topic the speaker returns to again and again in early pieces, where they critique both white audiences’ appetites for anti-Black violence and the rewards that come to those who can satisfy those cravings. At the same time, there are poems about the persistent beauty of Black communities, even in the face of generational violence and the unfulfilled promise of progress: Neither exoduses from the Jim Crow South nor the first Black president have improved the lives of most Black Americans.

In “Minneapolis, St. Paul,” and “My Beautiful End of the World,” two mini-essays that cordon off the center of the book, Smith delves into the problems plaguing America’s heartland, ones that are in fact happening all over the country. “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” describes the protests following George Floyd’s murder in diaristic fashion, while “My Beautiful End of the World” chronicles how gentrification is killing the land and restricting access to what remains of its natural beauty. Later poems make clear that the dream of peace and the possibility of a utopia can exist, if in no other place, then in the poetry, right alongside an unabashed reckoning with poverty and racism. Bluff asks, “What shall we do with this land we were never meant to own?” and “How shall we live on it together in the little time we have left?” The answer may lie in the final lines of the book, where the speaker awakens next to a lover and is reminded of the power of the love they make together.

Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires: It interrogates the poet’s past work and revises it, while resisting the powers that threaten to sell us out and sell us short. In the end, it offers joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.

Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires, offering joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

When award-winning poet Shane McCrae was born to a white mother and a Black father in Oregon in 1975, his maternal grandmother designated him “white” on his birth certificate, claiming it was because she wanted him to have “all the advantages.” However, when she and her husband kidnapped him from his parents and brought him to Texas three years later, the 13 years McCrae spent with them were filled with anything but. 

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping is more than the memoir of an abduction: It is a story about how racial identity is shaped by both presence and absence in a child’s life. McCrae explores memory itself and what happens when violence and deception warp the brain’s ability to maintain clear distinctions between fact and fantasy. 

In chapters that read more like vignettes than chronological narratives, McCrae traces his journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and back again; narrates the complicated relationships between his mother and her parents; and mourns the absence of a father whom his grandparents attempted to erase from his life in every way possible. Throughout, McCrae undertakes in prose the age-old bard’s task: to lend a voice to—and by extension, make sense of—the inconceivable, even as the admitted gaps in his own memory work against meaning, resolution and wholeness. 

Pulling the Chariot of the Sun wrestles with the brain’s unreliability in the wake of trauma, as well as the reality that, regardless of who raised us, few of the stories we inherit about ourselves are accurate. McCrae’s work becomes less about arriving at any irrefutable conclusion and rather about reaching a point where we are willing to concede the impossibility of truth, even as we continue to reconstruct all we know in an attempt to get as close as we can.

In a gripping memoir, acclaimed poet Shane McCrae tells the remarkable story of how his white maternal grandparents kidnapped him in an attempt to shape his racial identity and erase his memories of his Black father.
FictionFamily Saga

A question of character

Interview by Destiny O. Birdsong

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the publication of Ayana Mathis’ next book, you’re not alone. The author herself was eager to finish The Unsettled, her sophomore novel. However, as Mathis explains during a Zoom call, the book—and particularly its characters—had other plans.

“There’s a really lovely origin story about The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” says Mathis from her second home in the Hudson River Valley, where she went to escape record-breaking temperatures in New York City. Mathis began writing her 2012 debut, which was a New York Times bestseller and the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, when a friend suggested several of her short stories could work as a book. The Unsettled, however, had no such beginnings. In fact, Mathis can’t recall the exact moment she knew what she was writing. “It was just a very long journey of becoming what it is,” she tells me. “I was writing around inside of it for a really long time.”

What The Unsettled became is a gripping novel about mothers and children, past and present, and the private hells in which we often find ourselves while searching for utopia. It opens in mid-1980s Philadelphia, where an unaccompanied 13-year-old named Toussaint Wright sneaks into an abandoned house with a stack of letters from his mother, Ava Carson, and grandmother, Dutchess. This image sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Dutchess and Ava take turns telling the story of their estranged family. Toussaint, the novel’s youngest but most perceptive narrator, tries to make sense of his own history as well as the chaos of the present.

“I’m not concerned about likability in characters. But I do want people to be able to attach to Ava, and I need[ed] to, in order to write her”

While Mathis is no stranger to multivocal narratives (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the lives of its eponymous matriarch, her 11 children and one of her grandchildren), the voices that compose The Unsettled are markedly different from her first book as well as from each other. Deceptively brief chapters carefully detailing Ava’s and Toussaint’s trek through the streets of Philadelphia are interspersed with Dutchess’ no-nonsense dispatches from Bonaparte, Alabama, where she is fighting to save her small, all-Black town from extinction. In each character, Mathis’ dexterity of voice is on full display. This is a riveting family story, and the people who tell it do so with finesse. For Toussaint, broken windows create “glass rain [that] sparkled like tinsel.” When Ava recalls meeting Toussaint’s father, Cassius Wright, for the first time, she describes her immediate infatuation with the man who was “the same tawny gold color all over: eyes and skin and hair.” To Dutchess, Alabama highways are “flat as a white woman’s behind.” Developing the kind of intimacy necessary to create these distinct voices was no small feat. Dutchess and Toussaint came easily to Mathis. Ava, however, was much harder to pin down. Proud, impulsive and prone to depression and prophetic trances, Ava is both pitiable and, at times, infuriating, even to her creator. “She and I had a terrible relationship for years,” Mathis says, shaking her head. “She refused to have a voice that was recognizable to me. She was very resistant.”

Even her name kept changing: Mathis was only able to find something that fit after she grew to accept Ava as an individual, flaws and all. “I’m not concerned about likability in characters,” Mathis explains. “But I do want people to be able to attach to Ava, and I need[ed] to, in order to write her more fully. I need[ed] to think of her as a full human being, not just someone I’m angry at or judging.”

Indeed, part of Mathis’ struggle to finish The Unsettled was the effort to map out the actions of the adult characters whose disastrous decisions drive much of the book’s plot. At the nadir of Dutchess’ nightclub singing career, she meets and marries Caro Carson, a native of Bonaparte, a town partially inspired by Gee’s Bend, Alabama. In the 1930s, the federal government sold tracts of land to its Black citizens as part of Roosevelt’s war on rural poverty. When Caro is killed by jealous local whites, Dutchess descends into a near-catatonic state that almost destroys both her and her daughter. Consequently, once Ava leaves Bonaparte as a young adult, many of her life choices are made to avoid returning home or becoming like her mother.

After a failed marriage, Ava reunites with Cass, who founds Ark, a commune for Black people in search of self-determined living. But soon, Ava is immobilized by his increasing radicalism and his sadistic means of controlling Ark’s inhabitants. Despite Ava’s best efforts, she and her mother are more alike than different. As Mathis points out, “Both of [them] meet men with whom they become completely and utterly enamored, sometimes to the detriment of their children. They’re [also] both drawn to these nontypical Black communities that are trying to find something like freedom, and struggling with what that is or what it might look like.” For both Ava and Dutchess, the search—and the fight—for home becomes paramount, yet a sense of home itself remains elusive. And in both cases, their children suffer for it.

Cass, a former Black Panther and disgraced physician, is also a complicated character. While his beloved Ark bears some similarities to 6221 Osage Avenue, the site of Philadelphia’s 1985 MOVE bombing, both he and his commune are more homage than historical fiction. Mathis, a Philadelphia native, describes that bombing as “an open, raw wound,” and says she is not attempting to tell its story in The Unsettled. Instead, her novel talks “about what the implications of something like that might be. What it means in terms of Black people and police interactions.”

“What I hope is that people enter the book in a spirit of generosity so they can spend some time with these people, even though they might hate them sometimes . . . . Remember that they are people and remember how infuriating the people we love can be.”

Likewise, Cass Wright is not a fictionalization of MOVE’s founder, John Africa. In fact, Mathis turned to many places for inspiration in her effort to complicate this handsome yet merciless figure. “I imagined him as this super charismatic shyster preacher who is taking everybody’s money,” she says with a smile. “But as I wrote him, I realized I wanted him to be right about some things. . . . He’s right about all of the issues around freedom. He’s right about the exploitation of Blackness. But he’s a pretty bad guy.” Cass becomes both Ava’s lover and her tormentor; her salvation, but also her obsession. Even in this way, Ava is not much different from Dutchess. As Mathis says, “She’s much more prone to fantasies and ideals whereas her mother is obsessed with this historical past. And they both in many ways sacrifice their lives to those enterprises.”

Still, Mathis warns against the danger of simply designating characters’ choices as good or bad. “A lot of this book is about the ways in which people figure out for themselves what survival looks like. And not just what surviving looks like, but what thriving looks like,” she explains. “And what that looks like for these people may not be what it looks like on a television show about the middle class.”

This is especially true for Toussaint, who realizes early that Ark might not be the paradise for which his mother has been searching. Once he discovers this, he begins making plans for their escape. “I think of Dutchess as a past, and Ava as a present,” says Mathis. “And Toussaint is the bridge between the two of them, and he’s also the future. There needed to be a future.”

Although he is still a young boy, Toussaint’s insights about the adults around him contextualize their actions even when he himself does not fully understand them. Despite Ava’s and Dutchess’ many failures, Toussaint’s love for them is persistent, and his desire to mend the rift between generations keeps the reader rooting for the survival of the entire family, even in their darkest moments.

Near the end of our interview, when I asked Mathis what she wanted readers to know, she offered words that could have been spoken by Toussaint himself: “What I hope is that people enter the book in a spirit of generosity so they can spend some time with these people, even though they might hate them sometimes,” she says with a laugh. “But still remember that they are people and remember how infuriating the people we love can be. The people we love hurt us more than anyone else. And we are more privy to their failures than to anyone else’s.”

The Unsettled, with its chorus of intergenerational voices and its themes of love, loss and legacy, contains many of the things Mathis’ loyal readers most enjoy. But there are also new characters to love and hate (or love to hate), and a story that is heartbreaking yet hopeful in ways that continue to surprise and sustain throughout. More than a decade in the making, it was definitely worth the wait.

Read our starred review of The Unsettled.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Ayana Mathis’ The Unsettled is a gripping novel about mothers and children, past and present, and the private hells in which we often find ourselves while searching for utopia. With its chorus of intergenerational voices and its themes of love, loss and legacy, it contains many of the things her loyal readers most enjoy, along with a story that is heartbreaking yet hopeful.
FictionFamily Saga

The Unsettled

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

Ayana Mathis’ outstanding sophomore novel, The Unsettled, separately follows a mother and daughter, Dutchess and Ava Carson, in the mid-1980s as they fight to build lives with a sense of stability, family and home.

Dutchess, a former nightclub performer who found a husband and a hearth in Bonaparte, Alabama, is struggling to save her adopted historically Black town. Racist violence has already claimed her husband, Caro, who was murdered by local whites decades earlier. Now, gentrification and a mysterious new visitor threaten to rob Dutchess of what she believes is her lone legacy: the land on which she has lived for 40 years.

Meanwhile, her daughter Ava embarks on a different quest: In the wake of Caro’s death and Dutchess’ near self-destruction, Ava wanders to Philadelphia, where, after a failed marriage and a stay in a squalid women’s shelter, she finds herself once again in the arms—and under the influence—of Cassius Wright, a charismatic former Black Panther and the father of her son, Toussaint. Along with a handful of other acolytes, Ava and Cass create Ark, a haven for Black people in search of economic and political freedom. But Ark soon becomes a house of horrors as Cass becomes increasingly tyrannical.

For both Dutchess and Ava, the stakes of making and keeping a home are high, and their willingness to go great lengths to achieve their dreams often causes unspeakable pain for the people who love them most. Their greatest hopes for redemption might lie in Toussaint, who is his mother’s secret and could ultimately be his grandmother’s salvation.

For readers who loved Mathis’ blockbuster debut The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Unsettled is another tale of a dynamic family and the aftereffects of intergenerational racist violence, but these new characters have voices and stories all their own. In short but perfectly paced chapters, Toussaint, Ava and Dutchess tell of not only their disappointment and despair but also their dreams, crafting a heartbreaking tale about Reagan’s America that deftly weaves the past and present into the possibility of a bright, if still-unfolding, future.

Read our interview with Ayana Mathis on The Unsettled.

In The Unsettled’s short but perfectly paced chapters, Toussaint, Ava and Dutchess tell of not only their disappointment and despair but also their dreams, crafting a heartbreaking tale about Reagan’s America that deftly weaves the past and present into the possibility of a bright, if still-unfolding, future.
NonfictionFamily & RelationshipsEssays

Ross Gay can write about more than just delight

Interview by Destiny O. Birdsong

It’s difficult to have a conversation with Ross Gay and not think of a moniker he’s picked up over the years: “the happiest poet around.” Gay is relaxed, genial and clearly excited about his second essay collection (and sixth book overall), Inciting Joy. With its 14 chapters, or “incitements,” covering subjects as disparate as death and losing one’s phone, Gay hopes his new book is proof that he can write—and in fact has always written—about subjects other than delight. “I feel like this book could also be called The Book of Rage,” he explains over our Zoom call. “Connection and holding each other through each other’s sorrow, to me, feels like an inciting force.” This is the premise of Gay’s powerful book, which begins with an imagined party for people and their sorrows, then segues into an exploration of sites where joy and solidarity defiantly abound.

Read our starred review of ‘Inciting Joy’ by Ross Gay.

In many ways, Inciting Joy feels emblematic of Gay’s most pivotal works in both poetry and prose, highlighting the beauty of everyday experiences such as communal gardening and enjoying music and the arts. For instance, Luther Vandross’ cover of Dionne Warwick’s “A House Is Not a Home” gets some well-deserved space, as does the comedic genius of Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor and Gay’s late father, Gilbert, affectionately known as “Poochie.” Meanwhile, other chapters explore equally familiar subjects but in surprising ways. For example, in “Insurgent Hoop (Pickup Basketball: The Ninth Incitement),” Gay discusses the necessarily anti-capitalist nature of the neighborhood court, which can only be reserved for one game at a time and where you might find yourself on the same team as someone you beat only moments before. “There’s never a spot or a time or a reason to have a fixed enemy,” he tells me. “We’re just here together for now. How do we decide at this moment, this group of people, how we’re gonna be together?”

Inciting Joy by Ross Gay

This question serves as a throughline for the book, manifesting itself in some of the most inhospitable places, such as the author’s father’s hospital room as the elder Gay was dying from untreatable liver cancer; on the makeshift skating ramps of his youth, where skaters were expected to share tools and protect one another from the wrath of cops and property owners; and most surprisingly, in the football locker room, where off-color jokes were plentiful but so, too, was tenderness. Players often shaved and administered balms to broken (and broken-out) bodies, even as they hurled insults and sexually violent threats to their opponents and to one another. In the longest and perhaps most moving chapter, “Grief Suite (Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement),” Gay explores both the brutality and the brotherhood made possible in such spaces, and he doesn’t shy away from his own complicity in toxic masculinity as a young man.

“How do we decide at this moment, this group of people, how we’re gonna be together?”

These transparencies, says Gay, are not only par for the course but sit at the heart of what he hopes to achieve in Inciting Joy. It was only a few years before the publication of his first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, that Gay realized prose writing could be pleasurable for him—as long as it wasn’t about showcasing some sort of absolute wisdom. “Instead, it could be about leaving an artifact of my thinking and making that as beautiful as possible,” he says. “But ultimately, [I wanted to see] if there was some way to make the residue of my thinking available . . . the residue of my thinking also being the evidence of my changing.”

As a poet, Gay has always been keen on taking the reader on an ever-evolving journey of thoughts and images, and this feat is prominently displayed in the footnotes that populate Inciting Joy. Some of them are so carefully written that Gay himself describes them as “discrete essays.” He says he understands if folks are reluctant to read them, but he insists that readers will miss quite a bit of information if they choose not to. In fact, he likens the footnotes to pauses in conversations between friends, where one person stops the other to ask for more information, or where the storyteller pauses to offer information they feel is crucial to understanding what’s being said. In other words, the marginalia of Inciting Joy share communal knowledge by offering the bounty of the backstory, much in the way gardeners might share seeds or skateboarders might share bolts from their personal buckets of spare parts. “The footnote is like, I’m serious about this,” says Gay. “I want us to know something about each other.”

“Books that I love make me feel regarded. If anyone feels that way, I would be very happy.”

Perhaps the highest praise I can offer for Inciting Joy is that, for Gay and for me, it sparked a delightful conversation about the wealth of stories, characters, memories and subjects the book undertakes, building upon one another to create such a rich biodiversity on the page that I often found myself reading passages multiple times just to make sure I’d absorbed every detail. We chatted about everything from my anxieties about teaching and house hunting in a new city to the generosity of Mr. Lau, the father of one of Gay’s childhood friends who is briefly mentioned in the book and whose donation of clippings from his backyard garden in Pennsylvania now live as fully grown fig trees in Bloomington, Indiana, where Gay lives and teaches. 

As we end our call, Gay admits that he’s curious about how Inciting Joy will be received, but his hope for it is a generous one. “Books that I love make me feel regarded,” he says with a grin. “If anyone feels that way, I would be very happy.”

Headshot of Ross Gay © Natasha Komoda

The bestselling poet says his second collection of essays could have just as easily been called The Book of Rage.
NonfictionFamily & RelationshipsEssays

Inciting Joy

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

Poet Ross Gay’s powerful sixth book and second collection of essays, Inciting Joy, opens with an imaginary house party to which people bring their sorrows as plus-ones. Soon the living room becomes a raucous dance floor, and in the middle of this unexpected mirth, Gay poses two central questions: What incites joy? And more importantly, what does joy incite in us?

Early on, Gay offers his own hypothesis that joy is “an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.” By holding each other through a range of emotions—grief, anger, curiosity and even hilarity—we co-create manifestos for survival, and we refuse to allow capitalistic ills like proprietorship and unbridled ambition to make our lives narrower and lonelier. During an interview with BookPage, Gay explained that the book’s goal is essentially “to study the ways and the practices by which we . . . care for one another. Probably with a sort of firm conviction that institutions do not do that.” He also mused that Inciting Joy could just as easily have been called The Book of Rage for its exploration of his own life at desperate moments, from the impending death of his father from liver cancer in 2004, to a period of deep emotional and physical distress that Gay, often called “the happiest poet around,” feared he wouldn’t survive.

Ross Gay shares how he hopes ‘Inciting Joy’ will make readers feel.

Yet, in the final chapter, joy reigns supreme, and the book ends with a very different kind of party: a potluck attended by members of the Dessalines Brigade, a group of Haitian farmers who, in the wake of the devastating earthquake in 2012, burned seeds donated by the agrochemical company Monsanto. These farmers’ joyful refusal of the gift, because it could have potentially introduced harmful chemicals into Haiti’s food supply, also speaks to the heart of Inciting Joy: that by regarding one another, and considering not only one’s own good but that of the greater community, we do more than incite joy. We save ourselves.

Poet Ross Gay’s powerful sixth book poses two central questions: What incites joy? And more importantly, what does joy incite in us?
NonfictionMemoir

Somebody’s Daughter

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

In one of the most disturbing and tender scenes in Somebody’s Daughter, a middle-aged Black woman lights a match and sets a snake nest ablaze. “These things catch fire without letting each other go. We don’t give up on our people,” Billie Coles explains as her granddaughter, the author Ashley C. Ford, looks on. Coles is attempting to demonstrate how families shouldn’t abandon each other, but Ford’s memoir offers an alternative survival strategy—one that sometimes depends on a person leaving.

Somebody’s Daughter is part Midwestern Black girl bildungsroman and part family saga about the rippling effects of incarceration. Ford’s father was jailed shortly after her birth, and her mother’s quests for new love often ended in frustration, which she unleashed on her eldest child. Their relationship was so volatile that after an adult kissed Ford when she was a child, and later when her first love sexually assaulted her, it took decades for her to reveal the truth to her mother.

In the meantime, she coped with her pain through daydreaming, dissociation and wandering the halls of her local high school, a precursor to the peripatetic life that would lead her away from her family in Indiana. It’s tempting to view Ford’s mother antagonistically throughout this book, but the author’s familial bonds aren’t that simple. Ford’s contentious relationships with her parents—a mother who often withheld affection and a father who was physically unavailable to express it—loom large, and it’s fitting that the book begins with a phone call from one parent and ends with a reunion with the other.

This book’s title is deceptively simple. In African American Vernacular English, it can be a euphemism for a woman in danger; but when Ford reunites with her father, it becomes a revelation of the author’s self. Finally, it makes clear that the life one builds in the aftermath of a tragedy can, in time, coexist with the life left behind.

After returning to her hometown near the end of the book, Ford writes, “However complicated, I could exist in both [New York and Indiana], as me, fully me.” Perhaps the greatest lesson of Somebody’s Daughter is that a Black child marked by poverty and sexual violence can create multiple spaces in which to thrive—and that anybody’s child can do the same.

Somebody’s Daughter is part Midwestern Black girl bildungsroman and part family saga about the rippling effects of incarceration.
NonfictionBlack HistoryBiography

The Three Mothers

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

In The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, Anna Malaika Tubbs tells three stories that are often overlooked but deeply important to civil rights history. Tubbs explores the lives of “the women before the men,” as she calls them: Alberta King, Louise Little and Berdis Baldwin. Though each woman came from a different part of the U.S. and the Caribbean, faced diverse social and economic challenges and had divergent interests and ambitions, Tubbs knew that, because the women were so close in age (by some accounts their birthdays are only six years apart), she would find common ground among these women's lives that superseded their connections to famous men.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Anna Malaika Tubbs reveals how becoming a mother herself shaped her vision for The Three Mothers.

Tubbs intentionally chose the mothers of leaders whose lives have been well documented so she could focus on the women’s lives instead. In this way, The Three Mothers offers space for Tubbs, a debut author, to weave biography and social commentary with the complex history of Black women living in the 20th century. Tubbs also makes room for moments of discovery that help us better understand how each of these civil rights icons' social activism and artistic endeavors were shaped by their mothers’ shining examples. For instance, Alberta King’s radical maternal tenderness set the groundwork for how her son would view himself as a “mother” birthing a dream of racial equality. We also learn how Louise Little’s childhood love of dictionaries would lead her incarcerated son, Malcolm, on a quest for knowledge that would reroute his early delinquency, and how Berdis Baldwin would pass on her gift of both the written and spoken word to her oldest son, James.

As Tubbs explained in an interview for BookPage, there is a troubling binary between motherhood and intellectual labor, and her writing about three women whose sons’ lives were shaped by their mothers (and not vice versa) is an attempt to turn that binary on its head. The Three Mothers does just that, expanding conversations about King, Malcolm X and Baldwin beyond what these men gave the world to include what the world gave them through the lives of three intelligent, ambitious, trailblazing women.

The Three Mothers expands conversations about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin beyond what these men gave the world to include what the world gave them through the lives of their intelligent, ambitious, trailblazing mothers.

NonfictionMemoirEssays

Like Love

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

“Innocence doesn’t exist. Complicity is everywhere,” writes Michele Morano in Like Love, a collection of autobiographical essays about romantic relationships that are not quite amorous. There's a piece about a man with whom she slept—literally—during a summer in graduate school; one about an elderly landlord she found herself having dinner with whenever her live-in boyfriend was away; and others about strangers like Tomas, who becomes her travel companion during a stopover trip to Germany.

Many of the encounters in Like Love are brief, but one figure returns throughout the text: Morano’s mother, Rita, an unlikely subject for a book mostly about sexual affairs that never materialize. Morano’s relationship with Rita is fraught with both bitterness and infatuation. The long-legged, beautiful woman appears early in the second essay, “Breaking and Entering,” which details the disintegration of Morano’s parents’ marriage; and she returns in “Evenings at the Collegeview Diner,” an essay that explains how Morano’s first job allowed her to rebuild a relationship with both her parents. Rita is arguably the love of Morano’s life, though she died never knowing this. In “All the Power This Charm Doth Owe,” Rita visits then-grad student Morano in Iowa City and clearly wants to stay, but Morano dodges her mother’s intimations and commences falling in love with the man who will help her conceive her next complicated love interest: her son. The final essay examines Morano’s anxieties as a new mother and newly orphaned daughter who is initially unsure whether she really loves her child.

Like Love asks readers to destigmatize our most illogical iterations of love—the love we have for our parents, platonic friends, children and, sometimes, other people’s children—because even when love is inevitably flawed, it is perfectly natural. From her explanations of the brain’s activity as we fall head over heels for someone, to a breakdown of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Morano makes clear that even though we are all complicit in love and its ensuing chaos, our only obligation is to experience it. “Feel the presence,” writes Morano at the end of Like Love, “the ever-presence of romance in all its many forms, most of which are puzzles, mysteries that point us toward deep reflection on who we are and how we live.”

“Innocence doesn’t exist. Complicity is everywhere,” writes Michele Morano in Like Love, a collection of autobiographical essays about romantic relationships that are not quite amorous.
NonfictionMemoir

Memorial Drive

Review by Destiny O. Birdsong

Fans of Natasha Trethewey’s poetry might think they’re already acquainted with the story of her mother’s death in 1985 at the hands of the poet’s stepfather. Most of Trethewey’s poetry collections shrewdly explore Gwendolyn Turnbough’s murder and Trethewey’s continual grappling with that grief. However, Trethewey’s seventh book and first memoir, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, is a new examination of the 35-year-old crime. It moves beyond simply recounting this loss to study the ways a mother’s death can shape a daughter’s relationship to memory.

Memorial Drive begins in Trethewey’s birthplace of Gulfport, Mississippi, where she spent her early years doted on by her mother and extended family while Trethewey’s father attended graduate school in New Orleans. After Turnbough’s first divorce, mother and daughter moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where Turnbough met and married Joel Grimmette Jr., an abusive, controlling man who would wreak havoc on his wife and step-daughter. Atlanta is also the place to which the memoir eventually returns when, 20 years later, Trethewey finds herself back at the site of her greatest tragedy and face-to-face with its lingering artifacts.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Natasha Trethewey reveals the ways in which her mother’s death shaped her into the artist she is today.

Like her earlier collections, Memorial Drive is written with a poet’s keen ear for language and Trethewey’s knack for historical detail and retrospection. Using descriptions of photographs, dreamscapes, memories of historical events (such as Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974) and even transcripts of the final phone calls between Turnbough and Grimmette, Trethewey builds a narrative that asks: How does one get intimately close to violence and still survive? Memorial Drive proves that the answer is neither simple nor singular, and memory is only one of the avenues we travel in our quest to remember those we’ve lost. The lives of our departed loved ones take on different weight and meaning as we live on without them.

As Trethewey herself stated in an interview with BookPage, “The memory of my living mother grows every day; it continues to grow.” Memorial Drive is the story of that memory, and of a daughter’s deepening love, which has survived long after her mother’s death.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Love audiobooks? Check out Memorial Drive and other nonfiction audiobook picks.

Fans of Natasha Trethewey’s poetry might think they’re already acquainted with the story of her mother’s death in 1985 at the hands of the poet’s stepfather. Most of Trethewey’s poetry collections shrewdly explore Gwendolyn Turnbough’s murder and Trethewey’s continual grappling with that grief. However, Trethewey’s seventh book…

NonfictionMemoir

Natasha Trethewey

Interview by Destiny O. Birdsong

My phone interview with the 19th poet laureate of the United States happens just days after a series of national tragedies: the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade at the hands of police officers, crimes that have plunged the world—and Black communities in particular—into grief and rage. These circumstances momentarily shift the direction of our interview, and it is Natasha Trethewey who asks the first pointed question: “How are you holding up?” Her voice is rich with an accent that reminds me of home (we both grew up in states along the Gulf Coast), but it’s also tinged with something else: the bone-deep knowledge of what it means to survive violent, life-shattering loss.

Trethewey has spent much of her career studying tragedies of both national and personal scale, and her seventh book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, is no different. It chronicles the life and death of her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who was murdered by her second ex-­husband, Joel Grimmette Jr., in 1985. Though several of Trethewey’s poetry collections deal with the subject of her mother’s murder (in particular Native Guard, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007), Memorial Drive is the poet’s first memoir.

The prologue begins with a description of Turnbough’s last professionally taken photograph, in which her black dress is so indistinguishable from the background that her face appears to emerge from darkness “as from the depths of memory.” What follows is a haunting exploration of memory—unpredictable, incomplete and at times obfuscating—through the metaphor of negative space, the area around a subject. Interwoven with the book’s chapters are breathtakingly short vignettes in which Trethewey recalls dreamscapes where her mother is still alive, sometimes older than she was at the time of her death. In the vignette that precedes the first chapter, a piercing light shines from a bullet wound in the center of her mother’s forehead, ringing her face in utter darkness as she asks Trethewey, “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?” 

“I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”

The chapters vary drastically in length, from single pages to much longer ones like “Evidence,” which includes transcripts of Turnbough’s final conversations with the man who would kill her only a few days later. During our call, Trethewey explains that she included these because, even when she’s recalling her own painful past, she is, at heart, a historian. “I’m someone who likes documentary evidence,” she says from her home outside Chicago. “I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”

Memorial Drive achieves all of the above, and the reader’s knowledge of how the story will end does nothing to detract from the beauty of its narrative. Trethewey’s life began in racially segregated Gulfport, Mississippi, where she spent her early years surrounded by her mother’s large family in a town that often treated her parents’ interracial union with open hostility. Nevertheless, she lived happily, doted on by great-aunts, uncles and her young mother, with whom she spent time alone as her father pursued graduate studies in New Orleans.

Tall and graceful, Gwendolyn Turnbough was a stylish, creative woman who made her own clothes and eagerly supported her daughter’s ambitions. For instance, when they moved to Atlanta shortly after Turnbough’s first divorce, a dark space beneath the stairs in their new apartment frightened young Trethewey until her mother transformed it into a playroom planetarium, complete with a desk, books and a velvet cloth sky with stars made from cardboard and aluminum foil. Years later, when Trethewey shared with the family her dreams of being a writer and her stepfather told her it would never happen, Turnbough openly defied him with the full knowledge of the abuse she might later suffer. “She. Will do. WHATEVER. She wants,” she told him in front of their two children. In every instance, Turnbough worked to make use of the spaces available to her daughter, ensuring that they were nurturing and, when possible, safe. “In some ways,” Trethewey says, “all of my relationship with my mother, up to losing her, was shaping me. I think that the love I had from her gave me the kind of resilience that could help me survive losing her.” 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Memorial Drive.

And yet, in spite of Turnbough’s efforts, the Atlanta years mapped out in Memorial Drive are warped by violence. Trethewey describes Grimmette’s physical abuse of her mother, but also his secret torture of Trethewey herself when the two of them were alone. Grimmette would force her to pack her things, then take her for long drives along Interstate 285, threatening to abandon her at every turn. On another occasion, he broke the lock on her diary and read its contents, after which Trethewey began addressing her entries to him, sometimes with explosive language.

When asked about writing to her stepfather in that diary, which her mother purchased in an attempt to offer her a private place to process her thoughts, Trethewey laughs. “I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew that if I did this, that it would be between us, and it would be this way that I could push back. It wasn’t until much later, once I became a writer, that I began to think about it as a defining moment in terms of me having an audience, or imagining that I was writing for someone to read it. I think that it had everything to do with the writer I became.” This destruction of privacy transformed Trethewey’s personal space into a public one, and the poet began speaking truth to power.

Trethewey’s loss of her mother shortly after turning 19, however, is the point at which she believes the second half of her life began; Turnbough’s death split her daughter’s life into two parts, much like the book itself. “I became a whole other person,” Trethewey tells me. “That’s why I structured things as ‘before’ and ‘after.’ The hardest thing to acknowledge sometimes is I don’t know who I’d be without her death. If you were to say to me, ‘She could come back right now, we could undo that,’ it would mean I’d be the one gone. I don’t know who would be here.” Again, what is missing highlights what is left.

Memorial Drive makes clear that the dead are more than their absence, the blank space where there was once a body, a life.

This admission reminds Trethewey of a moment that took place shortly after Turnbough escaped her abusive marriage. During a Friday night football game, Grimmette appeared in the stands as Trethewey stood with the other cheerleaders on the field. When she saw him, she waved, and only later discovered that he’d planned to shoot her that night as punishment for her mother leaving. Near the end of this section in Memorial Drive, Trethewey writes that, theoretically, her mother’s murder would have been impossible had Grimmette killed her first, a sentiment she echoes during our call. “For a long time, it felt to me like I had traded my life for hers,” she explains. 

However, loss and self-preservation are never mutually exclusive, and Memorial Drive makes clear that the dead are more than their absence, the blank space where there was once a body, a life. The book ends with the singular image of Turnbough’s still-beating heart, a choice that was influenced by a trip Trethewey took to South Korea. Over the phone, she paraphrases what a local poet told her during her visit. “One does not bury the mother’s body in the ground, but in the chest. Or, like you,” he said, turning to her, “you carry her corpse on your back.” Trethewey admits the observation was, at first, deeply painful, but over the years it has come to represent the ways her mother’s death and life live on. “I have planted my mother like a seed in my chest, in my heart—that’s the living mother,” Trethewey tells me. “The memory of my living mother grows every day; it continues to grow. And I carry her corpse on my back at the same time. And I wouldn’t dare put it down, and don’t want to.”

 

Poet Destiny O. Birdsong is author of the forthcoming collection Negotiations (Tin House).

Author photo © Nancy Crampton

Even when she’s recalling her own painful past, Trethewey is, at heart, a historian. “I’m someone who likes documentary evidence,” she says from her home outside Chicago. “I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”
NonfictionBlack HistoryBiography

Anna Malaika Tubbs

Interview by Destiny O. Birdsong

For Anna Malaika Tubbs, finding the inspiration to write her first book was a numbers game. After watching Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama about Black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA during the space race, Tubbs left the movie theater feeling both enraged and inspired. “I wanted to do something where I helped this issue of uncovering more ‘hidden figures,’ ” she says from her home in Stockton, California. She wanted to write about women who “were there right in front of us that we just weren’t paying more attention to, or who were intentionally being kept from us.”

With a background in sociology and gender studies, Tubbs was well positioned for the task. But she also knew that, in order to entice readers, she would need more than her sharp research skills; she would need a hook. So she turned to Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin and Malcolm X, three of the most brilliant leaders of the 20th century. Then she looked at their mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin and Louise Little, respectively. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Three Mothers.

When Tubbs learned that these women had been born roughly six years apart (though some accounts of their birth years vary) and that their sons were born within five years of one another, she knew she had uncovered an important connective thread. She followed it, and the result is The Three Mothers, a book that maps how misogynoir (the unique intersection of racism and misogyny experienced by Black women) shaped the lives of three young civil rights activists long before they raised sons who would become leaders in the movement. The Three Mothers discusses Louise’s work with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Alberta’s family history of faith-based activism and Berdis’ early years as a poet and spoken-word artist. As such, the book is part biography, part history and part running social commentary on the events of the past century. People might pick it up because they are interested in these iconic men, but what they will discover is an extensive and rewarding history of 20th-­century Black women.

Tubbs intentionally wrote The Three Mothers in language that is counterintuitive to her academic training. After countless days in special collections archives, poring over newspaper clippings, letters and interviews, Tubbs wanted to create something accessible to those outside the ivory tower, where emerging scholars are often encouraged to make their work “as elitist and complicated and boring as possible,” as she puts it. Because the activism of King, Baldwin, Malcolm X and their mothers was intended to benefit all people, Tubbs considered it unreasonable to write a text that was accessible to only a few. “I’m just not willing to play that part,” she says. 

In fact, The Three Mothers is the first step down what Tubbs calls the “public intellectual path” she has always wanted to take, sharing knowledge with people both within and outside the academy. With its conversational style and anecdotal imaginings of moments for which firsthand information is scarce, The Three Mothers tells a captivating story of women traumatized by the nation they and their sons would ultimately help transform.

In addition to shedding light on the lives of Alberta, Berdis and Louise, Tubbs also illuminates Black motherhood in general. Tubbs, who became a mother herself while writing the book, intimately understands what an undervalued vocation motherhood can be. Tubbs is the partner of Stockton’s first Black mayor, Michael Tubbs, and people often congratulate her high-­profile husband on the birth of “his” son while saying little to acknowledge the roles that she or her mother-in-law have played in the mayor’s personal and political success. Tubbs suspects this is because many people still assume that Black motherhood is neither an intellectually rigorous nor actively anti-racist endeavor, but she hopes her book can change that. “Black motherhood is about creation, liberation and thinking about the possibilities of the world that we can be a part of,” she says. “So many times our kids are painted as not human, and of course we see them as the most incredible humans in the world. Therefore, we have to change the world to see it the way we do.”

"Black women hold the truth and the key to the future."

This is illustrated time and time again in The Three Mothers as Tubbs explores how each woman worked to make her son see himself differently from the world’s harsh perceptions. For instance, Louise would reteach school lessons to Malcolm and his siblings to incorporate multiple languages and Afro-diasporic history. When a frightened young King and his father were harassed by white store clerks and policemen, Alberta would comfort her son but remind him that his father’s refusal to be treated like a second-class citizen was the right thing to do. And when a young Baldwin and his siblings were terrorized by his stepfather, Berdis stepped in, continually reminding her son that family solidarity and the fair treatment of others were important in spite of the abuse. In each of the book’s eight sections, Tubbs makes clear that, without these mothers’ instruction, none of the men born to them could have been the leaders they ultimately became.

Though Tubbs is both excited and anxious about this spring—she will defend her doctoral dissertation and launch her debut book within weeks of each other—she feels that now is the perfect time for her work to enter the world, and she has high hopes for The Three Mothers. “I want it to be that declaration that Black women hold the truth and the key to the future. People are quite open to that idea, maybe for the first time,” she says, citing the recent inauguration of the first Black woman U.S. vice president as proof that the conversation is ripe for change. 

There’s no doubt that The Three Mothers will be at the forefront of that changing conversation about Black womanhood, perhaps leaving readers as inspired and determined as Tubbs was when she walked out of the movie theater nearly five years ago.

 

Author photo credit, Anna Maliaka Tubbs

The Three Mothers maps how misogynoir shaped the lives of three young civil rights activists long before they raised sons who would become leaders in the movement.

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