#versify

New Release Spotlight: Nothing Burns as Bright as You by Ashley Woodfolk

A toxic obsessive romantic best-friendship between two Black girls who know that to actually give in and get together would spark the most dangerous flame, and who also set real ones together? A meditation on how not all friendships are meant to last, even if it’s the most compelling relationship of your life? One of the most stunning novels in verse you’ll ever read? If you haven’t yet picked up…

Saran Thompson, poet and rapper

A cool new podcast from Nashville Public Radio asks poets to turn other people’s life stories into poetry. It’s called Versify and the first episode pairs poet Saran Thompson with Fred Bailey, who runs an after-school program in Gallatin, Tenn. 

Bailey grew up blind on a farm, and he remembers his father’s reaction when a doctor first diagnosed him: 

“He said, ‘Let’s get it straight: So you’re black, you’re blind and you’re poor. … You only got two ways out of it: Think a lot of yourself and work like hell. …  I just taught you how to survive. If you’re able to get an education along with that, you’ll know how to handle the blackness and the blindness.’”

Love to see real life and literature coming together like this. 

(for Versify podcast and Makayla Wisniewski-Pride Nashville 2017)

The lump in your throat  be the time bomb be the tick of trembling toes be the soft space of darkness before

the curtains bloom open. Before petals of light-lint blossom on your face and the eyes meet the lights. Your mouth is now the explosion the firework of pride and clawing out of a shell never felt so full of sparks. Now darling,  be the thunder. Not the rattle of heels in leather cowboy boots but the becoming -  a cosmic self-collapse and rebirth. A voice made to turn any courtroom into a sanctuary. Praise everyone who has brought you to this moment, but especially yourself. Do not fear the open mouth for what might spill out. Fear the closing, how it makes the throat a chain how the chain is tough and rusted. Tough like the night you met Dawn with a loneliness the weight of silence and no one was there to hold you. I am here to hold you. Give me your sweatiest palm. Give me your shortest breath. Give me every moment you said no when you meant to say yes.