Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Tanella Boni is a major African poet, and this book, The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn, is her first full collection to be translated into English. These poems wrestle with the ethnic violence and civil war that dominated life in West Africa's Ivory Coast in the first decade of the new millennium. Boni maps these events onto a mythic topography where people live among their ancestors and are subject to the whims of the powerful, who are at once magical and all too petty. The elements--the sun, the wind, the water--are animated as independent forces, beyond simile or metaphor. Words, too, are elemental, and the poet is present in the landscape--"during these times / I searched for the letters / for the perfect word." Boni affirms her desire for hope in the face of ethno-cultural and state violence although she acknowledges that desiring hope and hoping are not the same--back cover.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders. Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors—Indigenous, Black, and white—in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story—and the song—of America itself. ([source](

The gospel of barbecue is a fine fire, a brilliance moving with swaying choir robes in a harmony of pain lived to sweetness. In poems that touch the most tender and open parts of the ancestral stream of what it is to be African and woman and southern in this America, Honoree Jeffers delivers song, sermon, and supplication. This is the opening solo of a voice in the widest range, a voice that will light and lead the way.

In this, her fourth collection of blues poems, Jeffers, who in previous collections had explored themes of African American history, Southern culture, and intergenerational trauma, turns to the task of seeking and reconciling the blues and its three movements--identification, exploration, and resolution--with wisdom.--From publisher description.