BLACK GOD MOTHER THIS BODY

by Raina Léon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2022

In this debut volume of poetry, a Black mother grapples with how to care for her child and herself in 2020s America.

Motherhood provides a new opportunity to ruminate on the nature of family, lineage, race, and colonialism. As León asks early in this collection, “What does it mean to be black, afro-boricua, diasporican, woman, mother, me?” Across shifting poetic forms, she explores memories of parents, uncles, aunts, siblings; snatches of mythology and history; and the ways in which her new son—and a pandemic—has changed her daily experience of the world. The collection is anchored by the 17-page sequence “blackety black black solstice cleave,” in which the Afro-Boricua poet, about to have a baby with her White husband, thinks back on her complex relationship with her troublesome Puerto Rican aunt. “You need to go to miami. marry a nice cuban. there’s too much black in the family. all these león men marry black women,” the aunt tells her. The poet, reluctant to challenge the woman directly, thinks, “my mother is black. i am black. in cuba, they had one of the biggest forced migrations of enslaved africans so they certainly black.” Such confrontations with identity are a recurring theme, particularly given the poet’s overlapping selves, each of whom carries her own stories, signifiers, and language. León finds herself metaphorically beseeching the heavens for guidance on how to raise the next generation in the midst of such multiplicities. The Black god of the title is Nyx, the ancient Greek personification of night, who “perches maternal, at the edge devouring,” and whose “skin prickles with an ever-primed mother fury. don’t. touch. my. baby.” As the volume comes at motherhood again and again from different angles, it becomes clear that the poet is learning not only how to mother her son, but also to mother herself.

León’s verses are sharp and steely, with lines that shimmer even as they cut. One poem begins: “sometimes i fear the casket shroud / will emerge from my own shadow / to greet me smiling with my son’s teeth. / this country is such a cruel winter / to black boys singing their spirits from dread; it hangs / their songs to clink on snow covered boughs.” The presentation varies from one page to the next. Lines fragment into lacunas; stanzas mirror one another from across caesuras. Some poems exist as or within images: “augmentee” includes jellyfish, snowy fields, silhouettes with line-drawn hearts, and census data about the enslavement of a 19th-century ancestor. Other poems shift seamlessly between English and Spanish: “i want her to be querida / no por los fuegos artificiales / intoxicantes internos / all our memories / su vida una luna brillante / y cortante / treasured on aged tree-knot tongues forever.” Standouts include “theophilus underlines emelina’s name” and “consolation of mothers,” which begins, wrenchingly, “i offer this, this is the suffering. / … / your body nests—ova within ova within ova, all possibilities / and promise of an eye fleck that remains yours— / you are changed. / you will never stop being mother.” Though the forms are motley, a coherent set of concerns emerges, and readers will delight in watching León juggle them like flaming torches.

A mercurial and memorable collection of poems about Black motherhood.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-955953-01-6

Page Count: 85

Publisher: Black Freighter Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY