Come, Sit A Spell

There is a kind of poetry that is so engaging that it becomes spellbinding. Come, Sit A Spell, is that kind of spellbinding poetry by Furaha Youngblood.Organized as a journey through the rooms of her home, Furaha Youngblood's sixth published collection invites readers into intimate, unflinching, and beautifully rendered spaces. Each section of the house holds a different experience of truth. In The Kitchen language itself- in the form of the parts of speech - folds into something nourishing and alive. In The Bedroom, the heart speaks its unguarded language: longing, desire, the ache and ecstasy of being fully seen. The Living Room opens its doors to the world outside, bearing witness to the erosion of democracy, the persistence of injustice, and the communities that refuse to be undone by either. In The Bathroom, the poems turn inward, meditative, candid, drawn from the stillness of candlelight and lavender and singing bowls. And on The Porch, where memory meets legacy, ancestors speak through the bones of those who carry them forward.Furaha Youngblood is a woman who has lived expansively, courageously, on her own terms. A former broadcast journalist and the first Black female news director of a major market radio station in Northern California, she went on to teach in West Africa, North Africa, and Central America. She climbed the Great Wall of China at 62. She has sailed the Thames, the Seine, and the Nile. She carries coral from the Caribbean on her windowsill and sand from the Sahara on her coffee table. She has written fearlessly from inside all of it: the beauty, the grief, the absurdity, the love, the anger, the grace, and passion.Beginning with her first poetry collection in 2011 and continuing through a short novel, short stories, essays, and her celebrated memoir Life in the Briar Patch: The Extraordinary Adventures of a Woman Past Her Prime, Youngblood has spent more than a decade building a body of work that is distinctly, undeniably hers. Come, Sit A Spell: Spellbinding Poetry is perhaps her most intimate. These poems do not look away from racism, ageism, or the slow dismantling of the world's softer instincts. But they do not surrender to bitterness either. Instead, they insist with startling tenderness on the eternal power of love, language, and the kind of bravery that endures with each step.Although Youngblood declares, I write to save my Self in these pages, she saves something for the reader as well.Come, Sit A Spell: Spellbinding Poetry is for anyone who has ever needed words to make sense of a world that resists explanation and for anyone who has ever found, in someone else's poetry a room that feels like home.

Pagina's: 120, Paperback, Furaha Youngblood