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This exquisite debut poetry collection delves into the past and present of California’s Bay Area, meditating on themes of family, migration, girlhood, and identity amidst a backdrop of urban redevelopment, gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Wendy M. Thompson meticulously charts a region where race, class, and language are but a few of the fault lines that fracture society, sparking recurrent tremors of violence and resistance and aftershocks of displacement and belonging.
List of contents
Part 1:
county maps Black California Gold
Part 2: Black in California
Black California Freedom
Black Southern Migrant Gifts
Earth ¿¿ Mother ¿¿ Father ¿¿ Race ¿¿
Catch the Spirit
Small Girl Smell
My Mother in English
San Francisco (an ode to Harlem of the West)
Part 3: In Oakland, there was once a forest of old-growth coastal redwoods
Black Garden Songs
A Delight (The Food Poem)
Family Money: A Prescription Told in Voices
California Wildfires, 2020
The Thing about Nature
Black on BART
Part 4: California Blackout
Black at Home in the Bay Area
Investors Leave No Landmarks
Life and Death in the Time of Black Lives Matter
Acknowledgments
About the author
WENDY M. THOMPSON is an Oakland native whose creative work has most recently appeared in
Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diasporä,
Juked, and
Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is an associate professor of African American studies at San José State University.
