A Black Doe in the Anthropocene
Poems
No American education should be considered complete without a visceral understanding of plantation life for teenage Black girls in the slavery centuries before the Civil War, when molestation and sexual trauma were so routine that enslavers viewed them as an entitlement. These details, in Artress Bethany White’s mind, must never be skipped over. Thusly, the Black fawns are heard on high in this staggering collection. The author of My Afmerica: Poems and Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, White is an associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University.
Every Day Can Be Resistance
When I examine the portraits of the enslaved
the whole of freedom pauses for respiration
hands sifting soil abject frustration.
Every day can’t be rebellion but will be resistance
a man convinced that he is not a cow or horse
the way someone wants him to mistake himself.
The hands of enslaved women like mitts, or
an old man’s work hands years past labor,
still refusing balm
until fingers bowls of palms
crack, bleeding red lines like paper cuts in winter.
And so many women praying
unlike children with hands flat and fingers steepled
beneath raised chins, but palms clasped,
fingers hugging, too swollen from work, chillblains, and arthritis
to ever lay flat unless broken.
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
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