Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts
Named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry
Publication Date: April 2020
Trade Cloth: 256 pages / 7 x 9.5 inches
ISBN 978-0-8101-4201-5
$29.95
Order from Northwestern University Press
From the publisher: Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney’s fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of “docu-poetry.”
The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the “insurgent sensualist,” hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: “I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . .”
The tenderness of a father’s handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl’s fountainhead takes over every page. “One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.
Reviews
"This is a gorgeous, multi-valenced, illuminated exploration into Finney's thickly, rapturously rooted life. A family history that skeins into South Carolina's lore. A queer Black woman poet's purposeful wandering into becoming." —Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio
"About a month into quarantine 2020, Finney released perhaps the most history-and-affection-freighted book to be published this harrowing year." — Sojourners
"In the tradition of Toni Morrison’s Black Book, this collection creates meaning through juxtaposition of text, images and historical artifacts. Consider the quotation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 statement “the sugar they raised was excellent – nobody tasted blood on it," which erases the enslaved Black body as a site of white violence on sugar cane plantations; this is juxtaposed with an exclamation from Sandra Bland in 2014 – "Good morning, my beautiful kings and queens!" – whose own Black body became a site for white violence and embodies the white violence toward Black bodies that is off-screen in Emerson’s quote. Nikky Finney explores the presence of anti-Black violence embedded within American cultural norms as well as the Black love that sustains throughout. — Hope Wabuke, author and book critic
"Finney’s work is grounded in memory, and she traffics in the trauma and joy implicit in our lives and days. Her poems elide the generational and the personal with ample music. They are, therefore, more than taut with vital details; they are alive with nuance and contrast, where doom is rightfully proximate to creation and grace." — Sewanee Review
“A paean to the culture of African Americans and their history and culture of survival through creativity—in your face, loud, emotional, outrageous truth.” —Ed Roberson, author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World
"Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, the poet’s first new collection in nearly 10 years, demonstrates how Finney continues to push herself and expand our idea of poetry’s scope." — Ciona Rouse, for Chapter 16
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