Casual Conversation (New Poets of America, 47)

White, Renia

ISBN 10: 1950774554 / ISBN 13: 9781950774555

Published by BOA Editions Ltd. (edition ), 2022

About this Item

It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience.

Seller Inventory # 1950774554-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Casual Conversation (New Poets of America, 47)
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (edition )
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1950774554
• ISBN 13: 9781950774555
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

A Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy.

Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause.

Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?

About the Authors

Renia White is the author of Casual Conversation (BOA Editions, 2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Originally from PG County, Maryland, her family relocated to the southside of Atlanta the same year she turned 13. She went on to earn her BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell University where she also taught. A BOAAT fellow, she received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award in poetry. Her work appears in publications such as The Offing, Slice, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in New York City.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the GLCA New Writers Award, and a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Girmay is the winner of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry. She teaches in Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry.