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Reviews
Red Beans and Ricely Yours
By Mona Lisa Saloy
Winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize
These narrative
poems celebrate the day-to-day lives of Black New
Orleans and the rare magic in the culture. Vibrant with
local history and color, these poems have a Black
sensibility that reaches beyond boundaries, with folk
sayings turned into polished verse. From Black talk to
verse forms, Saloy never loses sight of the African
American cultural roots of her community.
Truman
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Mona Lisa Saloy captures the street idioms and culture
of New Orleans that challenge the tourist misconceptions
about that fabulous city. She also succeeds where many
performance poets fail. These poems are music to the ear
as well as on the page.—Ishmael Reed,
2005 T. S. Eliot Prize judge
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Southern poetry has long been a wonderful affair, a
depiction of the heart’s struggle in that life way down
there, all too often a white soiree, and male to boot,
with poems as rigid as bankers’ suits, and change the
grim subject of the day. But real poetry is so alive it
sweeps along like the Mississippi in New Orleans,
touching everything, its life and its will, knowable but
not known. That’s why poems that please deeply and
endure arise from place and character and forces,
forging lives not always as we want them (though
sometimes!), but as they have been and are. Mona Lisa
Saloy’s prize-winning collection is black and female and
southern and a literary event. The language is lively,
the life is palpable, the observing eye is accurate and
selective in distinctive ways, and the heart here is
both true to the self and honest in its presentation.
You don’t know New Orleans if you haven’t read this
collection. You don’t know southern poetry if you
haven’t read this book. You don’t know the fun serious
poetry can be if you haven’t read Red Beans and Ricely
Yours. Ms. Saloy does, yes she does.—Dave Smith,
Johns Hopkins University
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Mona
Lisa Saloy is not just a poet, she is a N’awlins woman.
Her poems will put a smile on your face like a good bowl
of gumbo. Some of them are better than oysters on fried
bread. Mona Lisa is a woman with a Nat King Cole kiss of
a name. Now I have her book of poems to hold in my
hands. I don’t need hot sauce to make me shout—RED BEANS
AND RICELY YOURS.—E. Ethelbert
Miller, Howard University
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When she arrived unexpectedly on the heels of a
mysterious visit from a midnight haint, her delighted
father named her Mona Lisa and raised her in New Orleans
in a house full of good love, good music, and good food.
It should come as no surprise that her poems are as
richly evocative as the taste of homemade gumbo and the
sound of a second line band. Mona Lisa Saloy's poems are
love songs to family and freedom and the magic of the
city that continues to define her work and her life.
Red Beans and Ricely Yours is pure pleasure.—Pearl Cleage, author
of Babylon Sisters
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This poet of New Orleans excels at
storytelling....There’s this extraordinary sense of
place. It is the dominant theme: the importance and
significance of place caught up in and creating identity
and a sense of being. For New Orleans is a way of life—a
religion, a way of being, a unique and extraordinary
cultural way of existing within the context of racial
oppression and poverty.—ChickenBones:
A Journal
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Far from the many neo-formalist and l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e
winners of other contests that year, Saloy’s is a plain
spoken meander through New Orleans neighborhoods, one
front porch at a time...For those who remember the
pre-disaster new Orleans and miss it...for those who
delight in a family history honestly portrayed, Mona
Lisa Saloy’s Red Beans and Ricely Yours will be a warm,
familiar read.—suite101.com
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Contents
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| Red Beans and Ricely
Southern |
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|
Word Works |
3 |
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Back on the Block |
6 |
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This Poem is for You My Sister |
8 |
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My Mother's the Daughter of a Slave |
11 |
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For
Frank Fitch |
12 |
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Southern Sisters |
14 |
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Frontliners |
15 |
|
Louisiana Log |
17 |
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A Few words on My Words |
19 |
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I Had Forgotten the Lord |
20 |
|
Shotgun Life I: Home |
23 |
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Shotgun Life II |
25 |
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Shotgun Life III |
26 |
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Shotgun Life IV: Section 8, 2003 |
28 |
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Shotgun Life V: Remembering D |
29 |
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Shotgun Life VI: Roots, 200 years,
Louisiana Purchase |
30 |
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Shotgun Life VII: Old school, Circa 1960 |
31 |
|
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| Red Beans and Ricely Creole Quarters |
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Nat King Cole Babies and Black Mona Lisa |
35 |
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My Creole Daddy I |
39 |
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Daddy's Philosophy II |
41 |
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Daddy Poem III: New Orleans Then |
42 |
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Daddy Poem IV |
44 |
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For Daddy V |
45 |
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On My Block |
47 |
|
Heritage |
48 |
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Parochial Product |
49 |
|
My Cousin My Brother |
50 |
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French Market Morning |
52 |
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French Market Friend |
53 |
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Recycling Neighborhood Style |
55 |
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Villanelle for Voodoo |
57 |
|
The Ballad of Marie LeVeau |
58 |
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The Last Mile |
62 |
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A Taste of New Orleans |
66 |
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Summer in New Orleans |
68 |
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On Writing |
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This Afternoon . . . |
73 |
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Email: Hey Now |
74 |
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When We . . . |
76 |
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The First 30 Days |
77 |
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Charm Fails Death |
78 |
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Deuces Running Wild |
79 |
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Telling Poem |
80 |
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Like Langston Hughes Did |
82 |
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| Red Beans and Ricely Black |
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| Glossary |
103 |
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| About the Author |
107 |
Published
by Truman State University
Press --tsup.truman.edu / Hardback $2495 / Paperback $14.95
 |
Mona
Lisa Saloy is associate professor of English and Director of
creative writing at Dillard University (before Katrina). She won
the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for this collection. She
has also won fellowship from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and from the United Negro College Fund/Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation. Her poems have appeared in anthologies,
magazines, journals, and film. She received her PhD in English
and MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University and
her MA in creative writing and English from San Francisco State
University. Displaced by hurricane Katrina, Saloy is a
visiting associate professor of English and creative writing at
the University of Washington for the 2005/2006 academic
year. Mona Lisa Saloy Bio |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
7 March 2012
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