America, a Love Story

Dungy, Camille T.

Wesleyan University Press（2026/03発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 104 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780819502261

Full Description

New poems on love, family, and art from the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

America, A Love Story is Camille T. Dungy's powerful testament to living and loving as a Black woman and mother in today's America, and her first book of poetry in almost a decade. Piercingly honest and deeply compassionate, this poetry moves through the mounting griefs of contemporary American life with unwavering clarity. The book is part indictment, part celebration—full of gratitude, fear, resistance, and hope. Dungy explores intimacy, parenting, racism, history, and the natural world with clarity and depth. Some poems reflect on the past; others respond to the work of contemporary Black artists. Many are formally playful, including a series of 700-character poems inspired by the 700 hours of sleep a mother loses in her child's first year. Gorgeous, bright, and bold, these poems speak from the edges—between mother and child, body and earth, self and country. They hold tension and tenderness in equal measure, creating a space for love amidst uncertainty.

[sample poem]

To enter our own empty house

She was seven when we stopped
using keys. One less thing to lose.
Now we punch a combination.
Easy, but hopefully not so easy
a stranger could guess. This is where
I should stop. They are bound
to be angry, my beloveds. I am
giving away all our secrets again.
Vulnerability is the root of much fury.
                           =
I was small. A stone in the yard
hid a metal case with a lid
that slid like a matchbox top
to reveal our key. Lifting that rock
I thought of bashing someone's head. 
I thought of harm lurking, dressed
in the body of some stranger. 
                            =
Sometimes, I wrestle my daughter.
I make her tiny body work itself
out from under the weight I make 
of my own. In this way I try 
to teach her how it feels to break free.

Contents

This'll hurt me more

The average mother loses 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her child's life; or, what that first year taught me about America

in the hallway there used to be a hatch<

this beginning may have always meant this end

On "Brevity"

Catalog

Jamestown 2019

Show Us What You're Made Of

Prelapsarian

New Address

To enter our own empty house

Expectant; or, What the Transition Phase of Labor Confirmed about Being a Black Woman in America

Only Child

as if an etymology my love

Elegy beginning in the shade of Aunt Mary's mulberry tree

New Developments

Poem revised in a 12th floor hotel room after noticing a man in the building across the street was holding binoculars

True Story

Expectant; or knowing American women are more likely to die in childbirth than women in any other developed country and black women make up fifty percent of those deaths

When I die, I hope they talk about me

Advice

This weekend some white lady is running a tag sale

at John Hope Franklin's house

The Garden

As if a fairytale my love

High Water Mark

Visitation

Sanctuary

Golden Age

The Ticket

litany

The average mother now spends twice as many hours on childcare than did her counterpart in 1965, and she also spends three times as many hours working outside the home; or, How to sing a song of six pence when you're really feeling wry

Lesson

This is good

Garden Style

Remembering a honeymoon hike near Drakes Bay, California, while I cook our dinner at the feet of Colorado's Front Range

Change of Life

Late Summer Then Blink It's Fall

Fame • One Night in 1888, as the French steamboat Abd-el-Kader powered from Marseilles to Algiers, news reports proclaim the sky became quite black with swallows

Spring Creek Trail

Let Me

Acknowledgments and Notes