ROOM SWEPT HOME

A new poetry collection by Remica Bingham-Risher, award-winning Cave Canem poet, essayist, and most recently the author of Soul Culture.

Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living?

In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is diagnosed with "water on the brain" - postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery - nine days after birthing her first child. In 1941, Mary is sent to the Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane, a stone's throw from where Minnie resides.

Utilizing primary and secondary sources that suggest possibilities of what her ancestors may have seen and known - their daily things, evidence that they marked this land and were more than marked by it - Bingham-Risher weaves together a richly textured vision of her foremothers' everyday and exceptional living: two disparate women at opposite ends of their lives, converging upon the same space and time, ushering in the generations who will, in turn, usher in Bingham-Risher herself.

Not only do these poems reflect the infinite layers these women's lives added to the fabric of the American tapestry - with experiences spanning slavery to the Civil War, Reconstruction to Red Summer, the Great Depression to WWII, the Civil Rights, Black Arts and Women's Movements to Vietnam - but they also subvert and expand upon paradigms of African American woman- and motherhood, highlighting the agency, duality, and revolutionary living that accompanied their survival.

With the kaleidoscopic imagination and historical excavation at the heart of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's The Age of Phillis and the tender interiority of Nikky Finney's Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, ROOM SWEPT HOME serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us.

Remica Bingham-Risher is an Affrilachian poet and essayist, Cave Canem fellow, and the author of Soul Culture, a memoir in essays; Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and a finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award; What We Ask of Flesh, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Writer's Chronicle, Callaloo, Essence, and a host of other outlets. She resides in Norfolk, Virginia, with her husband and children.