brittbat 's review for:

Funeral Diva by Pamela Sneed

5.0

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I'm unintentionally reading quite a few books about--or that at least touch on--the AIDS crisis this year. Detransition, Baby; Anesthesia; Gentrification of the Mind... And now Funeral Diva, which moved higher on my list of reading priorities when it won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Sneed opens her collection with a couple of prose pieces that contextualize the poems to come and set up the themes with which they're concerned: the impact of AIDS on Black gay men and lesbians, the legacy of slavery and the relationship of African Americans to Africa, police and state violence against Black people, and the author's life (both her childhood as an adoptee and her coming-of-age as a lesbian). It reads as an assertion of the power of language both as testimony and a way of creating liberatory futures. I won't say that Sneed is an Audre Lorde for today, because Lorde is timeless, and we will always need her work. But reading Funeral Diva evoked some of the same feelings as reading Sister Outsider for the first time.