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"I" : new and selected poems
2019
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"The acclaimed author of ""The Black Notebooks"" offers a collection of poetry that spans 50 years of life experience." - (Baker & Taylor)

Winner, 2020 Frost Medal
Finalist, 2019 National Book Award
Honorable Mention, 2020 BCALA Literary Awards


Toi Derricotte’s story is a hero’s journey—a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. “I”: New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.
 
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.
- (Chicago Distribution Center)

Toi Derricotte's story is a hero's journey'a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. 'I': New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet's inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman's response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.
 
This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.
- (Chicago Distribution Center)

A Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry
Recipient of the 2020 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Poetry
BCALA Honor Book for Best Poetry Award 2020 - (Chicago Distribution Center)

Author Biography

Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter and four previous poetry collections, including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is cofounder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
- (Chicago Distribution Center)

Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker's Daughter and four previous poetry collections, including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is cofounder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
- (Chicago Distribution Center)

First Chapter or Excerpt
The blessed angels
 
How much like
angels are these tall
gladiolas in a vase on my coffee
table, as if in a bunch
whispering.  How slender
and artless, how scandalously
alive, each with its own
humors and pulse.  Each weight-
bearing stem is the stem
of a thought through which
aspires the blood-metal of stars.  Each heart
is a gift for the king.  When
I was a child, my mother and aunts
would sit in the kitchen
gossiping.  One would tip
her head toward me, “Little Ears,”
she’d warn, and the whole room
went silent.  Now, before sunrise,
what secrets I am told!—being
quieter than blossoms & near invisible.
 

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Publishers Weekly Reviews

Derricotte (The Undertaker's Daughter), writer and cofounder of the Cave Canem Foundation, is a seminal figure in the American poetry community. Drawing from five previous books spanning over four decades, this retrospective volume unflinchingly explores the author's complex experiences as a light-skinned black woman in America. "For years, to avoid conversations that would take/ a lifetime, minds purposely dulled for generations/ (‘Single consciousness,' Dubois might have called it),/ I would say when introduced—to avoid later embarrassment/ For us both—I'm Toi Derricotte, I'm black, and stick my hand out." Poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Anne Sexton, as well as artists and performers such as Natalie Cole, Billie Holiday, and Alice Neel appear throughout the collection. In raw, confessional poems, the speaker chronicles the abuse she experienced at the hands of her father, as well as the graphic, stunning and powerfully feminine experience of a natural childbirth. Derricotte's attention lingers on places of struggle where life is at its most vibrant, urgent, and surprising: "to hold that pain/ until it writes a poem, to hold it/ for years until you learn both the holding and the writing." (Mar.)

Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly.

Table of Contents

Preface to the New and Selected Poems
Speculations about "I"
xvii
After all those years of fear and raging in my poems
5(3)
After the Gwendolyn Brooks reading
8(1)
Among school children
9(2)
As my writing changes I think with sorrow of those who couldn't change
11(1)
Biographia Literaria Africana
12(1)
Blessed angels
13(1)
Elegy for my husband
14(1)
The enthusiast
15(1)
The exchange
16(1)
Gifts from the dead
17(2)
Glimpse
Black woman as Magician at CVS
19(1)
The most surprising and necessary ingredient in my mother's spaghetti sauce
19(1)
Bad Dad
19(1)
Glimpse
20(1)
I count on you invisible
21(1)
I give in to an old desire
22(2)
The intimates
The intimates
24(1)
On a woman who excuses herself from the table, even in restaurants, to brush her teeth
24(1)
Homage
25(1)
Jerry Stern's friendship
26(1)
La fille aux cheveux de lin
27(1)
Lauds
28(1)
Midnight: Long Train Passing
29(1)
My father in old age
30(1)
A nap
31(1)
New Orleans palmetto bug
1. False Gods
32(1)
2. Why the giant palmetto bugs in New Orleans run toward you when you are screaming at them to go away
33(1)
Note
34(1)
Pantoum for the Broken
35(1)
The Peaches of August
36(1)
The permission
37(3)
The proof
40(4)
Rereading Jerry Stern
44(1)
Sex in old age
45(1)
Streaming
46(1)
Summer evening at Still Point
47(1)
Telly redux: Sharon asks me to send a picture of little fishie Telly
48(1)
Watching a roach give birth on YouTube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God
49(3)
"What are you?"
52(7)
The Empress of the Death House
sleeping with mr. death
59(1)
the story of a very broken lady
60(3)
the mirror poems
63(6)
the face/as it must be/of love
69(1)
doll poem
70(2)
new lady godiva
72(1)
The Grandmother Poems
The Empress of the Death House
73(2)
The Feeding
75(2)
The Funeral Parade
77(1)
from a group of poems thinking about Anne Sexton on the anniversary of her death
78(2)
unburying the bird
80
Natural Birth 4(121)
Introduction: Writing Natural Birth
85(3)
november
88(4)
holy cross hospital
92(5)
maternity
97(1)
10:29
98(6)
transition
104(6)
delivery
110(12)
in knowledge of young boys
122(3)
Captivity
The Minks
125(2)
Blackbottom
127(1)
Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
128(2)
St. Peter Claver
130(1)
The Weakness
131(2)
Fires in Childhood
133(3)
High School
136(1)
Hamtramck: The Polish Women
137(1)
The Struggle
138(1)
Before Making Love
139(1)
On Stopping Late in the Afternoon for Steamed Dumplings
140(1)
Stuck
141(1)
Squeaky Bed
142(1)
The Good Old Dog
143(1)
The Promise
144(2)
For a Man Who Speaks with Birds
146(1)
Touching/Not Touching: My Mother
147(2)
My Father Still Sleeping after Surgery
149(1)
Boy at the Paterson Falls
150(1)
Fears of the Eighth Grade
151(1)
The Furious Boy
152(1)
In an Urban School
153(1)
The Polishers of Brass
154(1)
For the Dishwasher at Boothman's
155(1)
Plaid Pants
156(1)
Books
157(1)
Allen Ginsberg
158(2)
On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses
160(2)
A Note on My Son's Face
162(7)
Tender
Preface
169(2)
Tender
171(2)
Exits from Elmina Castle: Cape Coast, Ghana
The Journey
173(1)
The Tour
174(1)
Tourists' Lunch
174(1)
Beneath Elmina
175(1)
Above Elmina
176(1)
Slavery
176(1)
Power
177(1)
Market
178(1)
When My Father Was Beating Me
179(2)
Black Boys Play the Classics
181(1)
Brother
182(1)
Family Secrets
183(1)
After a Reading at a Black College
184(1)
For Black Women Who Are Afraid
185(1)
Passing
186(2)
Bookstore
188(1)
Invisible Dreams
189(4)
Two Poems
Peripheral
193(1)
Bird
193(1)
1:30 A.M.
194(4)
Dead Baby Speaks
198(7)
The Origins of the Artist: Natalie Cole
205(1)
From a Letter: About Snow
206(1)
Not Forgotten
207(1)
Grace Paley Reading
208(1)
Clitoris
209(4)
The Undertaker's Daughter
Preface to The Undertaker's Daughter: An apology to the reader
213(4)
Part I. The Undertaker's Daughter
I am not afraid to be memoir
217(1)
Beds
218(19)
The undertaker's daughter
237(2)
Sunday afternoon at Claire Carlyle's
239(2)
Dolls
241(11)
Mistrust of the beloved
252(3)
Part II. A Memory Of The Future
I see my father after his death
255(3)
My dad & sardines
258(2)
The new pet
260(1)
The Telly Cycle
261(14)
For Telly the fish
262(2)
Special ears
264(1)
Another poem of a small grieving for my fish Telly
265(2)
On the reasons I loved Telly the fish
267(4)
Because I was good to Telly in his life,
271(2)
An apology to Telly the revolutionary
273(2)
When the goddess makes love to me,
275(1)
Untitled
276(1)
The night I stopped singing like Billie Holiday
277(6)
When I touched her
283(1)
A little prayer to Our Lady
284(1)
Cherry blossoms
285(4)
Part III. The Undertaking
The exigencies of form
289(1)
The undertaking
290(7)
Acknowledgments 297

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