Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry

Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney’s fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of “docu-poetry.”
 
The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the “insurgent sensualist,” hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: “I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead . . .”
 
The tenderness of a father’s handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl’s fountainhead takes over every page. “One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.

• Finney is one of the most recognized and lauded writers in the world of poetry in general and in African American letters.
• She is winner of the National Book Award-winning Head Off and Split (2011)
• The collection and her acceptance speech were both inducted into the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC
• This collection is long-awaited follow-up
• Excerpts to appear in Oxford American, Blood Orange, perhaps another national literary magazine.
• Required reading for Finney completists.
• Includes an element of memoir, a trending genre
• A frequent and popular keynote speaker at literary events
• Other notable works include On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), Heartwood (1997), and The World is Round (2003). She edited the collection Black Poets Lean South (2007)
• Several short films on Youtube will highlight and draw attention to the collection
• Link to NBA acceptance speech: