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Book Cover for: Mule & Pear, Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Mule & Pear

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Winner:Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary_award -Poetry (2012)
These poems speak to us with voices borrowed from the pages of novels of Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison--voices that still have more to say, things to discuss. Each struggles beneath a yoke of dreaming, loving, and suffering. These characters converse not just with the reader but also with each other, talking amongst themselves, offering up their secrets and hard-won words of wisdom, an everlasting conversation through which these poems voice a shared human experience.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
  • Publish Date: Oct 3rd, 2011
  • Pages: 97
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.60in - 5.90in - 0.40in - 0.50lb
  • EAN: 9781936970018
  • Categories: American - General

About the Author

Griffiths, Rachel: - Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, writer, painter and photographer. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and others. Her literary and visual work has appeared in Callaloo, The New York Times, Crab Orchard Review, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Poetry, and many others. Griffiths is the author of two books, MULE & PEAR (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011) and MIRACLE ARRHYTHMIA (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2010), and two chapbooks, Turn of Heaven (Paris Boulevard Press, 2009) and According to Beauty (Paris Boulevard Press, 2010). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.

Praise for this book

"The poems give voice to a cross-generational dialogue that includes protagonists from American classics like Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Jones's Eva's Man (1976), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), as well as from lesser-known American texts like Valerie Martin's historical novel Property (2004), and contemporary African classics-in-process like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Yet while Griffiths's focus is on the most poignant, memorable and troubling characters of black women's fiction, black female characters from male-authored works like Jean Toomer's hybrid New Negro text Cane (1923), and August Wilson's play Two Trains Running (1992), as well as voices from Adrienne Kennedy's play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) and Nina Simone's classic 1966 song "Four Women" share the pages of Mule & Pear with foremothers of the black female novel. Plucking chords from each of these voices, Griffiths orchestrates collaborative testimonials and incisive debates about the most pressing issues facing black women's writing and black women's lives.....The want you feel at the end of Mule & Pear is just the kind of want you hope for in turning the last page of a good book. It's the wish that the voices you have been sitting with will not leave, the promise that the conversation will continue."--Mecca Jamilah Sullivan "Cerise Press"