Black Girl, Call Home: Poems

Sometimes readers fall in love with a book instantly. I remember feeling this with a book by Richard Brautigan when I was 18. And with a book by Danusha Laméris last year. It’s a joyous recharge. Pulitzer-prizewinner Jericho Brown says of Jasmine Mans’s second collection, “You are carrying in your hands a Black woman’s heart.” Danez Smith calls this book “an urgent and grand work.” Jasmine Mans, resident poet at the Newark Public Library and spoken-word powerhouse, says, “I want to honor the silent story, the emotions unaccompanied by human language. I want to honor the weight of the stillness. I want to honor the silent ceremony between mother and daughter.” This astonishingly frank collection does all that and much more. Mans describes life in a way that makes readers want to be better people immediately. “Tell me about the girl / my mother was, / before she traded in / all her girl / to be my mother.” In poems as honest as earth and sky, she celebrates girls and women, the mysteries of powerful relationships (both enduring and fleeting), the preciousness of memory, complicated legacies, magic, sex, and macaroni and cheese. Readers will find the detail and humanity of her poems riveting.