Description: A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience.
Brief description: Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in a chapbook, Something of Yours, and in several journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, Berkeley Poetry Review, African American Review, pluck! and Obsidian. Maples teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Review Quotes:
Kwoya Fagin Maples says it plain: 'Bodies above virtue are never black.' In her debut collection, Mend, here is a black southern poet and mother explicitly acknowledging the lineage from which she descends--we are both haunted and healed by history. Maples's poems are narrative-driven, yet clear-voiced and lyrical; she writes us a world, a history, with her vision and leans back into a past to write herself into the story, while depicting the abuses to the black woman's body in the name of science, and calls out: 'There is suffering here.' In stories like those of Anarcha, Delia, and Sims, we hold our own breath through each sonnet sequence, each prose poem, until we understand, like Maples does, that the black mother's body is 'an aching shell but . . . worth tenderness.'
--DéLana R. A. Dameron, author of Weary Kingdom: Poems