Horace Mungin’s brave attempt to fight against the multiple manifestations of injustice imposed by the conscious erasure of African American history is in keeping with the best of contemporary African American literature. Mungin deftly imagines the horrors of the Middle Passage, taking us back to the Cape Coast of Africa and telling the story of Khadija, “born to a time of trouble,” who was captured, imprisoned and carried on the slave ship, Clotilda “to look upon the world/That dark day of the/Darkest days in America.” And so it begins, the narrative journey that sweeps through these poems describing the African experience in America, “in this vacuum where there is no God.” In the pivotal poem “America,” Mungin lays it all out for us, from the “hocus pocus” of the ways in which the Constitution did not apply to black people, to the failures of Reconstruction and all that follows, these poems weave our history together until the present day and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. This is a narrative we’ve never heard told in quite this way, and it provides a context and an understanding long missing from our national conversation.
Notes from 1619: A Poetic 400-Year Reflection
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- 2 books
Marjory Wentworth
Marjory Wentworth is the New York Times bestselling author of Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets (with Kwame Alexander and Chris Colderley) and many other works and poems. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize six times. She is the current poet laureate of South Carolina. Wentworth serves on the Board of Advisors at The Global Social Justice Practice Academy, and she is a 2020 National Coalition Against Censorship Free Speech is for Me Advocate. She teaches courses in writing, social justice, and banned books at The College of Charleston. Marjory first met Dottie in the early 2000s at a party; the next evening Dottie showed up at her door with a bottle wine and Marjory’s first book of poems and asked her if she could include one of her poems in the front of her forthcoming novel, Plantation. Their mutual love of the South Carolina low country bonded them, and their friendship was immediate. Both women were married to men named Peter; even their children were the same ages, and they remain friends to this day. Sometimes friends become family, and it doesn’t get better than that.
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