Full Description
From the foreword:
"In Perfect Black, Crystal Wilkinson walks us back down the road she first walked as a girl, wanders us through the trees that lined the road where she grew up, where her sensibilities as a woman and a writer were first laid bare. In one of the first poems that opens the collection she is a woman looking back on her life, on the soil and mountains that first stamped the particular sound of her voice and she is deeply inquisitive about how it all fell into place: "The map of me can't be all hills& mountains even though I've been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two."
Perfect Black is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this black writing girl's body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. We read and we hold on too.
Contents
Foreword
Section 1
Terrain
Baptism (Flatwoods, Kentucky 1972)
Cousin
Rapunzel Redux
Asking about My Mother
The Water Witch on Salvation
The Water Witch on Invasion
The Water Witch on Reading
O Tobacco
The Visit
Dig if You Will the Picture
Slow Dance
The Creek
Section 2
My Father Was a City
Beyond the White Canvas
August 9, 1974
Wet Nurse
The Bath
Dropsy
Death March
Dear Johnny P:
Dreams & Reality
Bones
Ole Fashioned
Black Farmer
Press
Dirge
My Black Body
On Being Country
Section 3
Bloodroot
Kitchen Ghosts
Snow Falls Like a Scorned Woman's Tears
Black & Fat & Perfect
Witness
Coming of Age
Dance
How to Make a Smile
Becoming
Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts
Motherland
Winter
Notes & Acknowledgements
