Description:
African American, Cabo Verdean/Wampanoag/Ioway all converge in Jewelle Gomez's exquisite collection of poetry that explores the legacies of family heritage, history, and identity. Gomez contemplates her sexuality, multi-ethnic and class identities, and what it means to experience love, loss, grief, friendship, and solidarity with other women during times of political upheaval. Gomez's poems are a gift: at times sumptuous and impassioned, and always striking in their clarity.
Review Quotes:
"By probing the depths of history and identity, the poems in Still Water, by Jewelle Gomez, amplify and illuminate the old saying "Still waters run deep." First and foremost, these are poems about people, relationships, and self-discovery. There are poems about and for Mildred and Richard Loving, Audre Lorde, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sally Ride, Gomez' mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and many more. Gomez takes her place among them, embracing her identity as a lesbian writer of multi-ethnic heritage: "black white brown / in no particular order . . . I was not a one / but many." And those many-African American, Cabo Verdean, and Wampanoag/Ioway-are eloquent and wise." - Lucille Lang Day, coeditor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and Becoming an Ancestor
"Jewelle Gomez's poems are like street maps, interconnecting families, tribes, communities and celebrating those routes that link her to each. San Francisco's historic fleet of streetcars glide through; friends arrive as well as history makers, legends, sisters. This book is a gathering, a true collection and recollection, of loves and Lovings, of heartbreaks and souljoys, of the lost and the restored. She is every daughter, every grandmother, every woman in this collection: a beautiful tree, its branches reaching to the sky." D.A. Powell, Professor and Poet, University of San Francisco
"Still Water is an experience of the holy - the holy Black, the holy Native, the holy Lesbian, brought into the realms of the daily, infusing all our hours with fresh insight and resilience...We all need these waters." Elana Dykewomon