A WOMAN AT THE BOOKSTORE READING
WONDERS HOW I MADE THE LEAP FROM MY FIRST BOOK
TO MY SECOND WHICH WON AN AWARD
She wants me to know how “different” my poetry is
one book to the next, preferring my second book that leaves her
blameless, where she can pretend we were sisters in ’63 or I am
her invisible playmate who keeps all of her secrets and doesn’t judge.
O yes, she believes these imaginings, so the first book, the one
that tackles all of the sticky subjects care-poor governors hate, sticky
the way adults know sticky, well past the lollipops of youth, more
the stained sheet sort, the toilet left unbleached and gathering bacteria
kind. The impolite discussion. The minstrel moving her chair backward.
Hand moving counter-clockwise, grease-paint dripping off in swaths,
masks the wear—
until race is sounded out by the slow-moving bare-
lipped black, named me, whose book is the one she buys, because
no one who could write a (second) book so “gracious,” so “forgiving”
could really mean what was written in the first.
Added: Wednesday, June 12, 2024 / Used with permission.
Vievee Francis is the author of: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies. Francis wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera, The Ritual of Breath. She has received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and Kresge Fellowship. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Image Description: Vievee Francis sits in her office at Dartmouth College and looks into the camera. She tilts her head slightly to the left and rests her chin on her hand. Vievee wears a light blue sweater with turquoise blue stone earrings.
