Full Description
Lolita Stewart-White's black frag/ments is a breathtaking series of narrative-lyric poems about the fragmentation of the Black body, family, and community facilitated by the historic and ongoing racism in the US healthcare system.
After her husband's cancer diagnosis, Stewart-White finds herself haunted by the trauma Black Americans continue to face in medical settings. These poems, both brazen and tenderhearted, explore enduring love in the face of grief and hardship while drawing parallels to past injustices. Stewart-White expertly weaves ancestral and present voices together, resulting in an intergenerational archive that centers one family's challenging journey in a broader context of how black people protest, repair, and revive.
Contents
Prelude to Blue
Burnt Orange Mountain
After the Diagnosis
Damn Damn Damn
Good Times (Strange Fruit Episode, 1976)
A Song for You
Kind of Blue: Variation One
Chorus of Ancestors
FADE IN:
Q & A
African American Sentence
EXHIBIT A - The Tuskegee Experiment
The House that was my Husband's Body
Kind of Blue: Variation Two
Dear Wife
Reconstruction
Way in the Middle of the Air
fragment: (n.)
Daughter's Responses to a Counseling Session
Dear Dad
Text from a Friend
Everything is a Black Girl
Kind of Blue: Variation Three
Heartache Ghazal
Afro Beautiful
Definition of Blue
Oncology Elegy
Chorus of Ancestors
How to Shield a Dark Body
Right On!
Exhibit B: Billing Department
Kind of Blue: Variation Four
Healing
Fugitivity
The House That Was My Husband's Body
Instructions for Intimacy after your Partner's Cancer Treatment
Husband's Instructions
Dear Death
fragment: (v.)
Exhibit C: Henrietta Lacks Speaks
AFib (or Revolution Redux)
Call and Response
Dear Husband
Kind of Blue: Variation Five
How to Cry without Tears
Root of my Blues
Chorus of Ancestors
African American Sentence
Emancipation Blues
The House that was my Husband's Body
Fragmented: (adj.)
Exhibit D: Dem Dark Bones
And You Don't Stop
Prayer in A Minor
Anointed
Chorus of Ancestors
Kind of Blue; Variation Six
Revolutionary Fragments
Black as Material, Mode and Movement
Intensive Care Rebellion
Self-portrait as Hoodie
Sounder
