It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving economic center. This planned transformation has a profound effect on the residents who live in Bellport as their own personal transformations take place. Sydney Stallworth steps away from her fellowship and law studies at an elite university to support husband Malachi’s dream of opening a business in the heart of the black community of his hometown, Bellport.
For Omar Bassari, an immigrant from Senegal, Bellport is where he will establish his drumming career and the launching pad from which he will spread African culture across the world. Della Tolliver has built a fragile sanctuary in Bellport for herself, boyfriend Kwamé Rodriguez, and daughter Jasmine, a troubled child prone to nightmares and outbursts.
The Talking Drum explores intraracial, class, and cross-cultural tensions, along with the meaning of community and belonging. It examines the profound impact gentrification has on people in many neighborhoods and the way in which being uprooted affects the fabric of their families, friendships, and emotional well-being.
The Talking Drum, Lisa Braxton’s debut, is beautifully written (perhaps why it’s being released by a press more known for their poetry), and transports us to early 1970s Massachusetts, where a predominantly black neighborhood is about to fall victim to the twin forces of gentrification and institutional racism, with a strong dose of corruption on the side.
To order, CLICK HERE.
For information about the author, CLICK HERE.
A powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, this is the story of the education of an American woman. Praised by writers from Tillie Olsen to Grace Paley to Alice Walker, this memoir has been taught and read by numerous students and teachers interested in stories of motherhood, African American autobiography, whiteness and American literature. In this widely read and praised memoir, Lazarre recounts the stories of her own life and its transformations through a deeper understanding of the world. From a crucial moment as a mother in which her consciousness is transformed, to comprehending the complexities and history of whiteness, she describes each step of her intellectual and personal journey toward understanding what she calls “the whiteness of whiteness.”
Inheritance is a novel of American race history: of relationships between people of different and mixed race heritages, of love, friendship and profound loyalty, and of deep ignorance, violence and hatred. The story moves from from the present time, back to the early 20th century in a Connecticut city, once a stop on the Underground Railroad, then back to the period of Slavery shortly before the Civil War in Maryland, on the western coast of the Chesapeake Bay. The white characters are all connected through a Black family, whose four generations move through the novel. This is a story of our shared inheritance, of what it means, in this nation’s history and present, to be so called “mixed” racially, and what it means within the lives of the people who carry these meanings and questions within themselves.
In Worlds Beyond My Control, Lazarre revisits the landscape of her pioneering first book, The Mother Knot, exploring with searing honesty the complexities of motherhood. In this later work, she tackles the emotionally demanding time when separation from children begins. Moving from a traditional narrative style, through the immediacy of a journal, and finally to a direct autobiographical voice, the novel interrogates genre itself while following one woman’s odyssey through a conflicted and confusing world. A white mother of black sons, Julia suddenly finds herself at a loss. One son is leaving home, a beloved child is struck with a serious illness, and throughout the city the dangers of racism’s physical, verbal and emotional violence toward black boys and young men increases daily as her beloved sons make their way through their growing lives. Fearful of crime in a crime-ridden city, learning to be fearful as well of police, Julia feels she is both “stark white and visible,” to her family and “trying to bridge their differences with her voice.” A writer in danger of losing her words, a mother who fears the loss of control, this is the story of a mother and a writer who learns to accept the limits of her power – the endurance to face a new relationship to husband and sons – to reclaim the power she has always felt in what she names “sex and words.”
In Hilda Raz’s dazzling List & Story, a pencil waits for us in every room, a bride and bridesmaid hold a trashcan between them, and April is recast as “a beautiful automaton” that lights peach blossoms on fire. These kaleidoscopic poems whipsaw between love and grief to create raw, unflinching elegies. Raz’s exquisite formal control is paired with associative leaps in these stunning explorations of identity, mortality, and the threshold between language and speechlessness… Bristling with brutal truths and sudden tenderness, Raz reminds us that, despite our losses, language and love will return in this life and the next.
