Book Description

Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian-Muslim woman and a Black man born into a Southern Baptist family in the Jim Crow South and George Wallace's Alabama, Geter charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships through poems complicated by migration, language, racism, queerness, loss, belief and lapsed faith, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Amidst considerations of family and country, Geter weaves in testimonies for Black victims of police brutality, songs of lament that hone each tragedy and like Antigone, demand we bear intimate witness to the ethical failings of the state. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, we witness Geter lace the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord in a collection rich with unflinching intimacy that, turning outward to face the country, examines how all of this is, like the speaker herself, stretched between the context of two nations. This collection that thrums with authenticity and heart.