The collection plate Poems

Kendra Allen, 1994-

Book - 2021

Looping through the overlapping experiences of girlhood, Blackness, sex, and personhood in America, award-winning essayist and poet Kendra Allen braids together personal narrative and cultural commentary, wrestling with the beauty and brutality to be found between mothers and daughters, young women and the world, Black bodies and white space, virginity and intrusion, prison and freedom, birth and death. Most of all, The Collection Plate explores both how we collect and erase the voices, lives, and innocence of underrepresented bodies--and behold their pleasure, pain, and possibility.

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Subjects
Genres
Poetry
Free verse
Visual poetry
Published
New York, NY : Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Kendra Allen, 1994- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xii, 78 pages ; 25 x 20 cm
ISBN
9780063048478
  • Evening service
  • Look at the material
  • I'm the note held toward the end
  • Company is coming over
  • Solace by earl
  • If I'm not my mother
  • The invention of the Super Sadness! was an accident
  • I hate when niggas die
  • Our Father's house (i)
  • #FreeMyNiggas but free my niggas
  • A trilogy everyone watches
  • My sex wet
  • I come to you as humbly as I know how
  • The many times I failed to defend my mother to Our Father
  • We had died real quick
  • Learning to tread water
  • Collection plates
  • Our Father's house (ii)
  • All the things that stretch out my lower back
  • Naked & afraid
  • Afraid & naked
  • The water cycle
  • Practical life skills
  • Melatonin
  • Our Father's house (iii)
  • Been back before
  • The Super Sadness! feels like anger which feels like
  • Let's leave
  • I ain't never baked a thing from scratch a day in my life
  • Our Father's house (iv)
  • Chihuahuas
  • I'm tired of yo ass always crying
  • If you throw me in this water what you're telling me is you want me dead
  • Most calvaries have dead people
  • The maybe memory
  • Happy 100th birthday
  • Who say good folk ain't supposed to die
  • When I eulogize Our Father
  • "No one had told her about the end of love"
  • Leave me alone
  • If I am the Father
  • Birth of black bishop
  • Our Father's house (v)
  • Sermon notes
  • Gifting back bread & barren land.
Review by Library Journal Review

Allen's debut collection focuses on themes of girlhood and womanhood, Blackness, faith, and family, with water imagery woven throughout in scenes from baptisms to swimming pools, as a source of nourishment and survival and as a representation of grief. One series of poems reflects on clean water: what it means to watch someone search for it on reality TV compared with what it means for those in Flint, MI, to live without it. Allen is gifted in structuring the poems on the page. In "If I'm not my mother" and "If I'm not my father," the poet leaves considerable blank spaces before beginning, giving the reader time to absorb the silences and their meanings. Other pieces like "We had died real quick" are structured to mimic the lanes of a swimming pool. In the end, Allen not only vividly captures the experiences of growing up in a Black religious family in the South, transporting readers through specific childhood memories and beautiful tributes, but also provides powerful cultural commentaries. VERDICT Recommended for all collections.--Sarah Michaelis, Sun Prairie P.L., WI

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