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A review by nicdoeswords
Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans
challenging
emotional
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.
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Police brutality
Moderate: Homophobia
Forced sterilization is another content warning!