Bøger af Glenis Redmond

Join Glenis Redmond, Greenville's first Poet Laureate, on a poetic journey through South Carolina's State Parks with "The Song of Everything". Being diagnosed with cancer and amid COVID, she visits South Carolina's State Parks with her grandson, Julian, as a life-affirming act for both of them. This pocket-sized collection of poems explores the enduring connection between the natural world and our internal landscape. Her poetry invites everyone to rediscover the wonders of the world around us, the stories they have to tell, and the lessons they have to teach us.

In this chapbook Glenis honors Harriet Tubman (conductor of the underground railroad), Harriet E. Wilson (first black woman novelist), Harriet Jacobs (abolitionist), Harriet Powers (quilter), Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer and Simbi (water spirit). "The Three Harriets & Others reimagine the agency and ancestral urgency of Black foremothers. Glenis Redmond raises her/their voices with fierce unflinching and unapologetic poetics. These poems offer an ancient, unshackled breath that allows them to "Spill ink like night clouds that clot what your soul cannot hold."

Hewing close to the bone, the incendiary poems in The Listening Skin explore how an artist dares to dance and create through a pain-riddled body. Corporeal and spiritual, immediately personal and deeply historical, Redmond's latest collection details how generational cycles of poverty, mental and physical illness, and systemic racism impact the self, the family, and the greater African-American collective. Examining the connection between adverse childhood experiences and adult chronic conditions, Redmond's poems arise from her deepest listening, beyond the skin, rooted in the marrow. They speak to the hardship of enduring fibromyalgia and the ongoing challenges of multiple myeloma while rejoicing in survival and the grace of existence itself. Yes, The Listening Skin affirms life and demands the dignity its speaker deserves: "I am full of this past present heat / I carry. / I come to the shore, / but I vacate nothing." This consummate work honors embodied knowledge, all that's heard at the boundary between flesh and air, vacating nothing, determinedly and brilliantly whole.