A poetry collection that reflects on intimate aspects of Black history, culture, and identity, revealing an uncommon gaze on working-class Philadelphia in vibrant lyric detail
In 55 poems, Migration Letters straddles the personal and public with particular, photographically-motivated detail to identify what, over time, creating a home creates in ourselves. Drawn from her experiences being born in Philadelphia into a Black family and a Black culture transported from the American South by the Great Migration, M. Nzadi Keita's poetry sparks a profoundly hybrid gaze of the visual and the sensory. Her lyrical fragments and sustained narrative plunge into the unsung aspects of Black culture and explore how Black Americans journey toward joy.
Propelled by the conditions that motivated her family's migration North, the poems pull heavily from Keita's place in her family, communities, and the world at large. They testify to her time and circumstances growing up Black in Philadelphia on the periphery of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Each poem builds upon an inheritance of voices: a panoramic perspective of an Easter Sunday service in a Black church gives way to the account of psychic violence in a newly-integrated school; the collective voices of a beauty salon's patrons fragment into memories of neighborhoods in North Philadelphia that have faded over time.
Migration Letters strives to tell a story about Black people that radiates across generations and testifies to a world that, as Lucille Clifton wrote, "has tried to kill [us] and has failed." They interrogate how one's present begins in the past, what we gain from barriers and boundaries, and what notions of progress energize our journey forward. What manifests is a personal intimacy on how Black culture can be inherited and built upon complex relationships where love and pain are inextricably linked. M. Nzadi Keita is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher. A professor of creative writing, American literature, and Africana studies at Ursinus College, she served as an adviser to the award-winning documentary BadddDDD Sonia Sanchez, and has consulted with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation and Mural Arts Philadelphia. Her most recent poetry collection, Brief Evidence of Heaven-a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Prize-sheds light on Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick Douglass's first wife, and is cited by David Blight in his prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Keita's work has been published in the anthology A Face to Meet the Faces: A Persona Poetry Anthology, and in journals such as Killens Review of Arts and Letters, Poet Lore, and Crab Orchard. Her prose will appear in the forthcoming When We Exhale: Reflections on Rest, Grief, & Intimacy, from Black Freighter Press.
