In the next chapter of the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Poetry Prize, we enter the poetic world of Vievee Francis. Bold and skilled, Francis takes us into the still landscapes of Texas and the fluid details of the African American South. Her poems become panhandle folktales revealing the weight of memories so clear and on the cusp. Her creative tangle of metaphors, people and geography will keep the reader rooted in a good earth of extraordinary verse.
Smoke Under the Bale Transfiguration <EPI> I 4 Amarillo Still Life in Yellow with Browns and Some Blacks The Plain of Sudden Circumstance How Easily Memory is Colored Bull Snake Gun of Wishes The Cowboy’s Son The Hiding Place The Conjunctions II Horse in the Dark I Will Be There Forever and Was Never There At All De rerum natura Marred Peaches Fishing Hole Poulter’s Measure The Rule of the Forest Still Life with Another Grandfather, Masons, and a Pie Under the Bed Eulogy With Feast and a Tall Black Man on Bass Still Life in Amarillo #2 Pig Head in a Plastic Sack III Before Crushing the Heads of Her Sleeping Boys She Heard the Breeze A-Whispering Killing Jim Mitchell Say It, Say It Any Way You Can Blue Haunt Tug Anteater Sugar and Brine Cane, Sweet and Dusty as a Teat IV The Beach Still Has its Dangers Water, While Not Love is So Similar At the Lethe I Met My Mother and She Did Not Know Me The Seahorse’s Lament On the Way to Round Rock Firmament of Glass Still Life with Summer Sausage, a Blade, and No Blood Memory and Plow A is for Ars Poetica Still Life in White with Free Men and Dust To Be Pegasus
Vievee Francis is the author of Blue-Tail Fly: Poems (2006). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several periodicals and anthologies including Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Best American Poetry 2010, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She was the 2009–2010 Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program and is the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Award, a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship, and Cave Canem fellowships. She is an associate editor for Callaloo.
