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"A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. As a competitive spoken-word poet who draws large crowds of people, Jasmine Mans's collection is divided into six sections, each with a corresponding active telephone number where she has recorded excerpts of her poems. You can listen now, just dial! Using poetry to bring change to the world with positive agitation and hoping to prompt dialogue where there is normally fear, poet Jasmine Mans explores the intersection of race, feminism, and queer identity in her latest collection Black Girl, Call Home..."--… (more)
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Home is safe. Home is where the memories are. Home is where you always return. Mans weaves a collection around these simple truths, pulling from personal history and the history of the United States (from slavery to the innocents dying these days) and somehow manages to make it sound almost hopeful and positive.
It is an oddly structured collection of poems - the book is not split into sections so you read about a girl getting her hair fixed and a second later you are on a ship carrying slaves; you read about missing girls followed by a lament about the boys that never come back home alive; she even managed to include a word search puzzle which actually fits and somehow makes sense in the whole.
And at the very end of the book are two diagrams - connecting the pieces and showing their relativity to the main topic - home. You do not need them to understand the connections but they enforce one more time the structure of the book. Were they done before the assembly of the book or were they done as the book got assembled? Who knows. They can serve as a blueprint or as compilation notes.
Highly recommended.
Her voice is so frank and direct, in turns celebratory and spiky and raw and empathetic and confrontational. A vital collection.