The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines motherhood-with and without children-and the common space between families, lovers, and strangers"--
Bold and skilled, Francis takes us into the still landscapes of Texas, evoking the African American South in fluid detail. Her poems become panhandle folktales fraught with the weight of memories both individual and collective. Her creative tangle of metaphors, people, and geography will keep the reader rooted in the good earth of extraordinary verse.
Vievee Francis's poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors - faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed.
A poetic treatment of the period of American history between the beginning of the Mexican War and the end of the Civil War, by Michigan poet Vievee Francis.
