South flight / Jasmine Elizabeth Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Jasmine Elizabeth, author.

Contributor:

Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry of places.

Black people--Poetry.

Black people.

Oklahoma.

African Americans--Poetry.

African Americans.

Oklahoma--Poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

88 pages : maps ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens, GA : Univ Of Georgia Press, [2022]

Summary:

In her debut poetry collection, Jasmine Elizabeth Smith takes inspiration from Oklahoma Black history. In the wake of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Jim Waters makes the difficult decision to leave behind his lover, Beatrice Vernadene Chapel, who as a Black woman must navigate the dangerous climate that produced the Jim Crow South and Red Summer. As Beatrice and Jim write letters to one another and hold imagined conversations with blues musicians Ida B. Cox, Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Ethel Waters, and the ghosts of Greenwood, the couple interrogates themes of blues epistemology, Black feminism, fraught attachments, and the way in which Black Americans have often changed their geographical regions with the hope of improving their conditions. The poetry collection South Flight is a eulogy, a blues, an unabashed love letter, and ragtime to the history of resistance, migration, and community in Black Oklahoma.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: pt. I Blacktown Blues of Oklahoma

Jim Waters Makes Parable of Seed

Beatrice's Prayer to Be Reborn in the South as an Old Cypress

Beatrice Repents on the Behalf of Nature

[Greenwood Ghosts Dress Their Sunday Best]

[Jim Imagines a Drink with Lead Belly after the Lynching of Lloyd Clay]

Beatrice Interprets a Night Terror

Jim Recalls the Soldier He Once Was

Beatrice Contemplates the Wild Dog Killing Prey

Love Letter on the Eve of Revolution

Beatrice Begs Jim to Pull Out Her Bad Tooth

Freedmen Ghosts Make Preparations for Juneteenth

Jim Writes His Marriage Vows

Qim Imagines the Ghost of Robert Johnson at the Cross-Roads]

Beatrice Advises Fathers When Jim Makes Way to Crossroads

Jim Recalls His Birth as a Wasp

How to Break a Generational Curse (& Other Lessons my Grandmother Has Taught Me)

[Father's Ghost Sees Jim Waters Off at the Santa Fe Railway Station]

pt. II Weeping for Spilt Milk: An Interlude

Ils M'ont Nommee la Mariniere

For Phillis Wheatly at Water's Edge

Indigofera

From the Southern Slave Medical Companion

Mulatto

Drowned & Reborn

Bodies Seen at or Disposal Sites: In Lack of Carnations

Historic White DET653

Zouzou

pt. III Correspondence from Chicago, Illinois, to Boley, Oklahoma

Correspondence from Boley, Oklahoma, to Chicago, Illinois

pt. IV Black Town Blues: Greensborough, Oklahoma

Beatrice Forges Jim's Love Letter

Beatrice Reads the Almanac to Forecast the Growing Season

[Boley Ghosts Haunt Jim]

Beatrice Visits the Church

Beatrice Imagines Ida Cox Pays Her a Visit at Her Dressing Vanity

B's Ascension to Bee

Beatrice & Gladys Bendey Discuss the Fortune of Livin Alone

pt. V [Jim Imagines He & Charley Patton Pick a Boweavil from Backyard Chicago Crop]

Jim Waters Sweet-Talks Beatrice about the Paradox of Blackness, Our Good Lord & Gold

Jim Writes Beatrice a Letter That Will Never Be Sent

Beatrice Forges Jim's Admission of Guilt

Jim Prays a Healing over B's Affliction

Correspondence from Boley to Chicago

Correspondence from Chicago to Boley

Jim Revisits the South

Beatrice Airs Out the House before Jim's Return

An Inventory of Her Blues

B Contemplates a Reconstructed South

Beatrice Makes Shadow Puppetry of Jim on a Sundown Billboard.

Notes:

The Georgia Poetry Prize.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Anne and Joseph Trachtman Memorial Book Fund.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

0820360902

9780820360904

OCLC:

1252961470