black pearl: eight poems and a poetic drama

Poetry. Drama. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Love is alive in White's eight poems and poetic drama that call on the feminine presence, through ancestral memory and legacy, to heal a broken heart. "[Arisa White] is a fierceless and tender poet who always brings into view what's strange and unusual and critical for our survival. Her poems consider what it requires to meditate and meet what's unknown without flinching."—Dara Wier "In this book, feelings are imperative, as is an imperative depth of self awareness, one that brings the reader to the edge. These stakes are no small stakes. Demanding, you need to let down your terror and There is no peace in running the truth of you, Arisa White builds a world where one must go to the edge in order to connect with one's own body and the bodies of others. One must speak in—and through—dislocation. The voices in this book seek always to locate themselves, and seem deeply committed to a life of dis/location. Across this island body I toss salt, she writes, I will not resemble trees and their reaching, and tosses us into forms poetic and dramatic, tosses us with her through relationship, earth, plant-life, race, police violence, history, identity and queerness, her language equally tossing amongst itself and its contexts, searching, pressing for what is true."—Leora Fridman, author of My Fault "History, memory, absence: how can we listen to the silenced names, the silencing betrayal of power, and the silence before it breaks? BLACK PEARL takes a searing, fearless look into the violence on the heart and construct of identity, and pushes "into the touch of things" to feel "our names inside" the rooted will that endures, the will that remembers, the will that loves. Arisa White writes a kind of heroic resistance that sings contrapuntally, we do not forget intertwined histories and perspectives that are at the heart of a reign of brutality, we sing into the future the litany of dead names. We are led compassionately and fiercely, to organize a cosmological we."—Tsering Wangmo Dhompa