Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Column: Breaking Free: Anthems for our time

http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/breaking-free

The fourth installment of my column "The Company We Keep" as writers: meeting novelist & poet #TishaniDoshi & poet #NancyMitchell and exploring Harriet Tubman's birthplace and museum #BlackHistoryMonth.

"All three women, from different periods and continents, are linked by how close they hold the earth, listening. As you drive out into Maryland, past farmland, into river deltas to beach, you can imagine Tubman crouching and hiding as she smuggled her people to freedom.

In Mitchell and Doshi’s poems, the earth and nature — birds, animals, bones of the dead — come alive to participate in the muffling, the soothing, and the upending of what we have repressed. These, and other voices, are the collective anthems of our time."
 


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