books
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The Help: I know I’m a day late and a dollar short in discussing The Help but I recently saw an interview/discussion between Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Tavis Smiley that made me order the book. I read it relatively quickly over a weekend. During my reading of it, a quote from Alice Walker…
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I admit it. I bought this book because I like Edwidge Danticat’s books and was very interested in reading her choices. So far I have read two of the essays in the book: Generation Why? by Zadie Smith and Beds by Toi Derricote. Generation Y was devastating in its critique of the Facebook phenomenon and…
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A think brown-haired girl pouts high on stage. She cannot swing her slight body round the new pole. It runs floor to ceiling, piercing the strip club like a shaft of light the way the voice of God appears in movies. Except this pole is plastic and God would gurgle because it’s full of liquid…
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1. in the shower naked he bends to suck milk life urge engulfs we tumble into stream barely able to separate closed in by the enamel fist 2. before the mirror he comes up as i look at myself cups them and squeezes they jump up hard nipples in dance-ritual he’s to my back enters…
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Thanks for the tree between me & a sniper’s bullet. I don’t know what made the grass sway seconds before the Viet Cong raises his soundless rifle. Some voice always followed, telling me which foot to put down first. Thanks for deflecting the ricochet against that anarchy of dusk. I was back in San Francisco…
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In the World language, sometimes called Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola under it is a symbol for speculation. Thumbs down to ear and tongue: World can be written and read, even painted but not spoken. People use their own words. Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g. OK and H2SO4,…
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Strange but true is the story of the sea-turtle and the shark- the instinctive drive of the weak to survive in the oceanic dark. Driven, riven by hunger from abyss to shoal, sometimes the shark swallows the sea-turtle whole. The sly reptilian marine withdraws, into the shell of his undersea craft, his leathery head and…
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The below quote is taken from the chapter, Framing the Panther – Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency by Joy James [Assata Shakur’s] eulogy for Safiya Bukhari, given in Havana on August 29, 2003, is haunting. Bukhari collapsed hours after she buried her own mother-the grandmother who raised Safiya Bukhari’s young daughter the day…
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for Lois, deceased he described you as a cracker battle axe but the woman i met was thin and haint-like i spoke to you as little as one can speak to an in-law and get along as did you we never called one another by name converse for the sake of function biding, tolerant whenever…
Tichaona Chinyelu 