The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey
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Publisher:  Norton,Ww
Date Published:  May 1999
Format:  Trade Paper

This exquisitely written journal will be one of the decade's most provocative and controversial books about race. "All my life I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness there, of remembering I am black. It may feel like emerging too quickly from deep in the ocean, or touching an electric fence, or like a deer paralyzed in the headlights of an oncoming car," writes Toi Derricotte, a light-skinned black woman. This book began as sketchy journal entries over twenty years ago when the author moved into an all-white neighborhood near New York City. "I believed that my unconsciousness of my blackness, my 'forgetting,' was symptomatic of some deep refusal of 'self,' a kind of death wish. . . . I wanted to capture the language of self-hate, the pain of re-emerging thought and buried memory and consciousness." Here the author describes encounters with family, neighbors, friends, and colleagues where she is forced to question what it means to be a black woman living in a racially divided world. The result is a brilliant and painful document, a meditation about the complexity of race in this country. It is also a book about uncovering the denied and shameful aspects of the self, and the author's journey toward self-acceptance. Excerpts from this book have appeared in Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, and Callaloo, among others.

Captivity
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Publisher:  University of Pittsburgh Press
Date Published:  October 1997
Format:  Trade Paper

Derricotte ( Natural Birth ) smoothly blends personal history, invention and reportage in her focus on the black female experience as a springboard for a broader examination of subjugation. Her unusual narrative prowess distinguishes the less formal, autobiographical first sections; ``Blackbottom,'' for example, describes family trips taken in childhood to neighborhoods that represent the speaker's own narrow escape --

"black middle class,
we snickered,
and were proud;
the louder the streets, the prouder''

and where throaty-voiced women can be overheard saying,

``I love to see a funeral, then I know it ain't mine.''

Style and structure grow more complex as Derricotte extends her discussion to other figures -- children in ghetto schools, a nun tried but acquitted of killing her newborn baby. When she leaves the political, however, her poetry dulls; for instance, she finds that books

``exhaust
you, like convicts
or madmen
too eager to talk.''

- Publishers Weekly

Tender
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Publisher:  University of Pittsburgh Press
Date Published:  June 1996
Format:  Trade Paper

In her fourth book, the award-winning Derricotte (Captivity, etc.) focuses on the aftermath of slavery, continued sexism and violence within the family. These poems plunge into the psychology of race and gender and other key components of identity. The seven sections radiate, like spokes of a wheel, from the title poem, which reads in its entirety: "The tenderest meat/ comes from the houses/ where you hear the least// squealing. The secret/ is to give a little/ wine before killing." Derricotte, a light-skinned African American woman, wrestles with "passing" in a still racist society. Her work reaches out into the black and white and comes up with meaning that is often complex and richin short, gray. Her subjects range from the Portuguese slave traders' fortress in Ghana (where Africans were held before being loaded onto ships), to domestic violence (in the prose poem, "When My Father was Beating Me"). The wheel comes full circle in the last section, which is about a remarkable sexual reawakening, and ends with a startling short poem, "Clitoris." Derricotte delivers frankness and hope through her thoughtful probing of encounters with complex racial and sexual relations. (Sept.) - Publishers Weekly

Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry
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Author:  Keith Gilyard (Editor), with Sekou Sundiata
Publisher:  Syracuse University Press
Date Published:  March 1997
Format:  Trade Paper

Spirit & Flame celebrates the creativity of the African American poet. This volume, comprising more than two hundred pieces, delivers the artistic and political fervor of new and established black voices around the country - in the oral tradition; in tanka and sonnets; in lyrics that echo the sound of jazz, hip hop, and rap. Heir to the classic Black Fire published in 1968, the book exemplifies modern black aesthetics, bringing together some of the best African American poets of the last decade.