Count Each Breath

Bücher

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A health care system built on bias and inequity, a system of policing that snatches our sons & daughters from our arms, and a pandemic painting a target on our backs - this is 2020 through the eyes of a black woman with chronic illness. If you've ever been dismissed, ignored, suspected, or accused by a healthcare provider, you will relate to these verses. ---- In this "Corona-cation"-created collection, Maria James-Thiaw delivers personal poetic reflections on chronic illness and mortality, race relations, and family history. The speaker's experiences form a colored chronicle of "Despair-ities" as fluidly surreal as Dali's melting clocks, in which she "folds up her somedays" in response to an immune system that "unpeels her like fresh fruit, " yet conjures music even from suffering ("My sister's cells sickle"). Her pain-pricked body is a voodoo doll. Even a right-wing white supremacist becomes a left-handed kindred soul whose "nerves burn like crosses on each vertebra." Count Each Breath scrapes the poem-bone raw. Its verses burn with rage, against an uncertain future, an unredeemed past, and a bruised and bruising, black and blue-and white-America. - Vernita Hall, author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color