black god mother this body

black god mother this body explores the divine, the ancestrally aligned, the natural rhythmed black woman in her embodied reality, particularly as mother. glorification of whiteness is death. this is a healing meditation, an extended song, an experimentation in augmenting reality that constantly threatens black mothers and children. it is also a covert communication in the hidden ways of trees. did you know that some can determine how to share resources through their roots and even support a cluster community in the dying of one tree so that others might be able to grow? león invites defiant and collective flourishing. this book integrates biomimicry, technology, afrofuturist practices and afrosurrealist revelations, and generational engagement even across human and nonhuman worlds. it boldly encounters the horrors of (digital) lynchings in the murders of black and brown peoples in spirit and in body while also uplifting new radical dreams. what we know to be true started as a dream; what is a nightmare can be countered boldly in communal power. here we find visual poems, halos in augmented reality, sonnets alongside couplet sequences, reinventions in form and the subversion of the "i" in favor of the "we". we find audacity against fear.

Author: Raina J. León
Publisher: Black Freighter Press
Published: 08/06/2022
Pages: 126
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.47lbs
Size: 8.00h x 8.00w x 0.27d
ISBN: 9781955953016


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/0001

About the Author
León, Raina J.: - Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra: (dis)locate, and the chapbooks,, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary's College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.

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