Call Her by Her Name

In Call Her by Her Name, the poet and performance artist Bianca Lynne Spriggs creates a twenty-first-century feminist manifesto suffused with metaphoric depth. This collection is a call-and-response of women—divine and domestic, legend and literal—who shape-shift and traverse generations. Through these narratives and cinematic poems, a chorus emerges of stories and lives rarely told.

Call Her by Her Name seeks to give voice to the voiceless, including lynched black women, the biblical "Potiphar’s wife," and women who tread the rims of phenomenal worlds—the goddess, the bird-woman, the oracle. While these poems reflect an array of women and women’s experiences, each piece could be considered a hue of the same woman, whether home-wrecker, Madonna, or midwife. The woman who sees dragons was perhaps once the roller-skating girl-child. The aging geisha may also be the roots woman next door. The woman who did not speak for ten years could have ended up sinking to the ocean floor. Spriggs gives each one life and limb, breath and voice, in a collection that adds up unequivocally to a poetic celebration of women.

BIANCA LYNNE SPRIGGS is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky. An Affrilachian poet and Cave Canem fellow, Spriggs is the recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and Kentucky Arts Council, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. In partnership with the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association, she is the creator of The SwallowTale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women. She serves as managing editor for pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and is the poetry editor for Apex Magazine.