Maples Mend

Poems
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8131-7629-1
Verlag: The University Press of Kentucky
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 96 Seiten, EPUB, Format (B × H): 139 mm x 215 mm

Reihe: University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series

The inventor of the speculum, J. Marion Sims, is celebrated as the "father of modern gynecology," and a memorial at his birthplace honors "his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike." These tributes whitewash the fact that Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on eleven enslaved African American women. Lent to Sims by their owners, these women were forced to undergo operations without their consent. Today, the names of all but three of these women are lost.
In Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims's autobiography: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims's lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as "bruised fruit." At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maples, Kwoya Fagin

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
The Door
Mt. Meigs Arrival
The Doctor Asks If I Want to Go Home the Way I Came
Today the Doctor Says He Will Be Gingerly
Wool Door
A Thousand Cats
Unfolded
To Bear Witness
Belonging
Delia
So Familiar He Is with Parting Her Brown Legs
Dog in the Hospital
Sometimes I Think I Should Have Stayed Where I Was At
Fresh Sheet
Oak, Pine, Basswood
Silk Umbrella, Dancing Pumps
Mary Catherine Is a Defeathered Chicken
Wild and Forbidding
I Can't Seem to Get to Mt. Meigs
Prayer Meeting
The Orange
Overseer Story (Told with a Smile)
Delia
Elegy for a Stillborn: To the One Who Carries Him Away
Southern Pastoral
The Milk Still Comes In
Delia
I Could Never Disremember the Fireflies
Moon
Just Like the Light of God
I've Got Life
What Yields
Invention
Blueberry Poem
Meeting Anarcha
Brief, Terrific Rainstorms
For Dorothy Lorena Davis
Her Knife: Elegy for Dorothy Lorena Davis
This Poem Resists with Joy
Teeth
My Mother Bathes Me after I Give Birth
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Maples, Kwoya Fagin
Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in a chapbook, Something of Yours, and in several journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, Berkeley Poetry Review, African American Review, pluck! and Obsidian. Maples teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in a chapbook, Something of Yours, and in several journals and anthologies. Maples teaches in the MFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.