Full Description
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman's speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.
Contents
Foreword by Kwame Dawes
Acknowledgments
Silhouette
I
Ordinary Heaven
Words We Lost in the Water
Unsolicited Witness
To Abel
Sugar
Section 8
The Key
First Red Dress
Admonitions
Twigs
Verse of Hairs
My Father Drops His Larynx
Denotation
Connotation
Parable of the Leaf
How to Make a Shadow
II
Intangible Quality
Women Brewing
Diviner of Teacups
The Kitchen-Dweller Presents Evidence
Trouble
Her House Is the Middle East
That Which Scatters and Breaks Apart
Invocation
The Kitchen-Dweller's Interlude
The Kitchen-Dweller Testifies
Desertion
The Offended Tongue
When the Fire Is Not Enough
Clearing the Land
Situations Wanted
The Figures
Convoluted Mattress
Water
For the Woman Whose Love Is a Bird of Passage
The Man Who Puts Dirt on His Head
III
The Glass Images
To the Angel of Accounts on a Holy Night
Tonight
Visitant
The Pilgrims
Woman, Ego, Shadow
The Woman in the Field
Gnats
Apparition One, Apparition Two
Amber Doll
Ken
Hotel Party
Princess Di in an Afterlife
My Brother Receives His Kingdom under a Tree
Proud Flesh
The Albatross Holds a Note in Her Bill
The Trumpet Testifies
Following the Horn's Call
The Beetle
A Dove Sings for Young Lovers
Western Gate
