Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - Black Girl, Call Home

I am not star rating this book because I'm not sure where I land, so here is just a longer review in text form with my overall thoughts. Content warnings apply here for homophobia, racism, police violence and murder, and forced sterilization. (I listened to all of the poems on audio while doing other things, so I may have missed something! But these are the main ones I remember.)

Black Girl, Call Home is a fairly long poetry book, coming in on audio at just over 2 hours. Many of the poems are on the shorter side, though. We get a lot that are just one or two lines long. By and large, the shorter poems were my least favorite of the bunch. Some of that had a Rupi Kaur-esque cant to them, which might appeal to some readers—they were fairly simple in language, and generally just a pithy sentence in response to the call of the poem's title. The ones I liked more were generally longer.

Mans writes across a variety of topics, from home life to culture and media critique to historical events and more. As a result, this collection felt at times disjointed, bouncing between topics/settings/scopes and making me wonder if some of these ideas wouldn't be better served in books of their own. (There is a series of poems directed to/about prominent figures, including Kanye West, that really won me over and felt underserved in the middle of this long collection.)

When the poems worked, however, they really worked for me. My favorites tended to be related to the speaker's relationship with her mother, all tied together neatly at the end with our final poem, which, in audio, consisted only of a long dial tone. The tension of Mans' identity as a Black lesbian felt extremely poignant and well conveyed, and I appreciated the rawness of the compassion she has for the family members, particularly her mother, whose implied rejection comes from a place of love. It's a complicated homage to a specific cultural dynamic and I felt it was deftly conveyed.

While I did really like the audiobook, which is read by the author, I would recommend picking this book up in print and flipping through for poems that really speak to you as a reader.

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fengxin's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

3.0

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michaelion's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

4.25

My girlfriend gave me this for my birthday, now I gotta give it back to him so they can read it too! 🥰

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ashleycmms's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective tense fast-paced

3.5

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yellow_star's review against another edition

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inspiring sad medium-paced

4.0

This probably is too much for many teens to read and this is mainly an adult book. Unless you're sadly already dealing with this heavy stuff in your own life.

There's a lot of sad in this, and it's not really a beautiful restful poetry book it's more of a mourning and rebellion book. The author discusses human rights violations against African Americans and queer people and women, writes poetic responses to celebrities like Kanye and Serena and Michelle Obama, and does some experimenting with form like a word search for women murdered as a racist hate crime. Even poems that should be happy like the love of a mother or romantic partner are uneasy and fearful of future pain and violence. The poems about abused slaves and rape are too real and painful to read. Overall a good thing to read, but choose a reading time when you have some emotional bandwidth free to process it.

There's also some sections on institutional abuse of the physically and mentally disabled. And some standing with missing or murdered indigenous women.

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