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Sons of Achilles by Nabila Lovelace (Digital)

Cover Art: Tamara Natalie Madden
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 60 pages
June 15 2018, ISBN 978-1-936919-51-2

 

about Sons of Achilles

 

Sons of Achilles questions what it means to be in and of a lineage of violence when every interaction one has with violence and intimacy, fictional and/or real, feed into relationships with self and others. How does a black woman parse, navigate, and unlearn the ways violence and intimacy intertwine when the trauma from it is familial, cultural, and even state sanctioned? From mythical characters that depict and pass down a progeny of violence through their canonization, to the witnessing of violence, this collection questions the ways violence enters and inhabits a life.

 

about Nabila Lovelace

 

Nabila Lovelace is a born and raised Queens native, as well as a first generation American. Her parents hail from Trinidad and Tobago and Nigeria. She currently resides in Tuscaloosa, AL. Her first collection, Sons of Achilles, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2018. Nabila is a 2016 Poetry Witch Magazine Summer Solstice Bop Contest finalist, a 2016 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest finalist, 2015 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow, finalist for the Emerge-Be-Surface fellowship 2014, and a winner of the 2013 Poets & Writers Amy Award. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Narrative NortheastWashington Square ReviewDay OneWinter Tangerine: Hands Up Don't ShootESPN, & Vinyl. She is co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival. Her editorial work includes screening for Callaloo Journal, assistant poetry editor at Black Warrior Review, & co-poetry editor for The Offing

Sons of Achilles by Nabila Lovelace (Digital)

SKU: 0300020
$5.00Price
  • Veterans Memorial Drive

    I am not a woman

    excited by war

    relics, though

    I am considering

    buying a gun. The kind

    lean as tenderloin, but still

    burst the fire through. I mean,

    I am a small girl

    in her lonesome. No

    guarenteed safety

    of my niga at night. No,

    just me, and my sharpest knife

    smoking an L

    near the window sill;

    there is an entire boulevard

    for a veterans memory

    in Tuscaloosa.

    Collective memory

    is a hell of a snag.

    My memory

    is a long Uhaul

    down Memorial Drive

    disobeying traffic

    I am the largest

    on this paved liquer,

    and even the smallest

    child burnt does not

    stop the maniacal laugh.

    I wonder if this is history

    when visting a country

    that has bombed you out

    the wazoo. My God. Where

    am I with my 12 guage shotty? Who

    am I but afraid

    living in a country

    that celebrates

    a machine that kills

    thousands of children

    and also prints

    God Bless America

    on its license plates,

    will garner  me

    the worst kind

    of karma.

YesYes Books
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