Vievee Francis is author of Horse in the Dark (2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She was the recipient of the 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is currentlyan associate editor for Callaloo.
"The poems in Vievee Francis' Forest Primeval are fearless,
full-throated, whip-smart and can come at you from just about any
angle--a Grimm's Fairy tale, a Howlin' Wolf lyric, starlings
bursting from a chest, a crow's-eye view of Christ on the cross.
Indeed, Francis examines the world omni-directionally, so that her
subject (or one of them) becomes the way in which the experience of
a place, and a time in life, get haunted by the past--by the places
and people and stories we carry in our bodies. I trust these brave,
prickly, luscious, erotic poems; they instruct me how to face the
world without fear and show me how to speak and be heard. 'You hear
me don't you? The waves aren't banging the shore/ too loudly are
they?' " --Sebastian Matthews
"Vievee Francis is a maker of magnificent, ferociously intelligent,
deeply moving poems, but to me her poems are not just poems and
this amazing book isn't just a book. Forest Primeval is a sacred
conversation with the reader, wrestling with the distressing angel
for all of us, and demanding a blessing." --Patrick Donnelly "Some
artists encounter a forest, a country landscape of overgrown grass
and wild flowers, a stream teaming with fish, and don't simply see
sunlight casting a holy gaze on a peaceful scene. Rather they are
sensitive to the dark underbrush curling in the forest, the choked
grass and flowers vying for space, the ravenous fish devouring a
carcass. In Forest Primeval, Vievee Francis cannot look away from
this more onerous view--from a landscape formed by the legacy of
slavery, oppression, and violence against Black people and,
especially, Black women. Fraught with images of confinement and
degradation, the book creates a speaker who struggles for survival
in a terrain pitted against her freedom. Yet the speaker is neither
passive nor simply objectified and subjugated by these experiences;
Forest Primeval captures her relentless drive to push through the
forest, however deformed or changed it may make her after it
transforms her." --Connotation Press
"Whether following her through the landscapes in which she's lived
or the landscapes of one's interior, Vievee Francis's bottomless
imagination continues to surprise in Forest Primeval. Who wouldn't
follow her as 'her eyes scan the horizon for the promise of more, '
when she offers so much more here than a turn of a phrase; these
poems build a world we all want to inhabit, even when times are
tough, and they recall a world we've survived enough to celebrate
in a manner that's both dignified and primal like "eloquent
tambourines" on a Sunday morning." -A. Van Jordan
"Vievee Francis's poetry is a callback to older days, reexamining
the myths that helped build society through the sympathetic lens of
a narrator familiar with her characters' hardships. This serves to
highlight how means of oppression have not changed, yet also shows
how much power people--especially women--can now have, with Little
Red Riding Hood pursuing a relationship with the wolf, rather than
being na.ve and victimized, or Belle, the Beauty, criticizing the
folly of cherishing a rose, in keeping with a modern critique of
superficiality. They understand the challenges the narrators face,
but never offer pity. Francis instead writes them with undertones
of strength, suggesting a means of empowerment in even the most
dire circumstances, making Forest Primeval into a fairy tale of its
own." -Rain Taxi Review of Books
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
