Description: "The third book in a trilogy revising the confessional, mahogany uses the music of Diana Ross as an emotive/sonic echo into which the poet sings the realities of being a grown, Black woman, losing everyone you ever loved, and still surviving, finding your calling and learning to love your beautiful, broken self"--
Review Quotes:
"To read mahogany is to st/roll with a new friend. The poems are as much tirade as they are tender telling, as much lyric blitz as spoken invitations to a way of surviving..."--Divya Victor, author of Curb
"erica lewis melds the raw emotions of love, loss, death, anxiety, and joy into a solid tribute to black endurance, her daily life and the heart of her history. Her dynamic phrasing riffs on her experiences like a praise song."--Lyn Ford, storyteller, poet, writer/Ohio Arts Council and the National Association of Black Storytellers
"In the tight-lined poems of mahogany, the repetitiveness of longing cycles into the brave insights of despair. After all, 'what is grief' one poem notes, 'if not preserving/love.' Like the Diana Ross's songs through which the poet refracts her own story, intense grief and love turn these poems 'inside out' until, sometimes, 'all that's left is joy'."--Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade