BookWoman Book Group: Gospel by Samiya Bashir

04/27/2010 7:00 pm
04/27/2010 8:00 pm

April is National Poetry Month, and the BookWoman Book Group will be celebrating with Lambda Literary Award-Finalist Samiya Bashir's Gospel. If you finish Gospel early, feel free to read Lucille Clifton's Voices (her final collection before her death on February 13th) as well; we can compare and contrast these two works during our discussion.

Gospel: Poems (Hardcover)

Email or call for price
ISBN-13: 9780978625177
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Redbone Press, 3/2009
"Gospel is an ecumenical resistance song in four parts. In this passionate follow-up to 2005's Lambda Literary Award finalist, Where the Apple Falls, Bashir s poems challenge truth to stare down the power of fear and paralysis. "We intended gospel to strike a happy medium for the down-trodden," said gospel music pioneer Thomas Dorsey. "This music lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke, and gave them some kind of hope anyway. Make it anything but good news, it ceases to be gospel." The good news, according to Bashir, is that we are neither alone in our mess, nor alone in our grasp of the tools to heal. In this pull-no-punches collection Bashir lays down a road map, a portable flashlight, and a shaky-legged escort to usher the way toward recovered sight and strength." --Amazon.com

Voices (Paperback)

$16.00
ISBN-13: 9781934414125
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: BOA Editions Ltd., 11/2008
"National Book Award–winner Clifton has long enjoyed national acclaim for her careful, colloquial, compact renditions of African-American voices, in memoirs, books for children and more than a dozen books of poems. This relatively short new collection excels in its opening pages, with wry comic verse in the voices of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and a devout raccoon: oh Master Of All Who Take and Wash/ And Eat lift me away. Cliftons more serious poems, where she speaks as herself, address her late parents, her delights as a grandmother and her mixed feelings about memory and her own body as she begins her eighth decade. A visionary sequence of very brief lyric works, A Meditation on Ten Oxherding Pictures, winds the volume up: i am lucille who masters ox/ ox is the one lucille masters/ hands caution me again/ what can be herded/ is not ox. Where Cliftons earlier poetry sought strength in African-American oral traditions, these poems look even further back, to the origin of writing (where a sketch of an ox became an aleph, then an A). Clifton (Mercy) retains an undeniable sincerity, an openness to her own emotions, and a rare warmth." --Publisher's Weekly

Location: 
Street:
BookWoman
Additional:
5501 N Lamar Blvd Ste A105
City:
Austin
,
Province:
Texas
Postal Code:
78751-1029
Country:
United States