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ruxandra_grr 's review for:
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
by Aja Monet
I started to read this so long ago, but it's hard for me to find the mood to sit still and read poetry and be in my feels. Luckily, I did this trick where I found a video of Aja Monet reading some of the poems in the book and I read along with her, pausing to read by myself the ones she didn't pick.
I was fortunate enough to be at Monet's reading in Bucharest a couple of years ago, a reading that made me cry and made me feel angry and made me feel hopeful and I can't find a better way to describe this book.
It's intensely personal and intensely political and the poems even go to pretty radical and challenging places, which... I want more of. Like the poem that is fiercely compassionate about her grandma leaving her kids behind to escape Cuba. Or the one about Christopher Dorner ('whistleblower'), the black cop who wrote a manifesto against the police and then shot some police officers and some family members. It's a hugely complex situation that the media simplified (obvs), but one that's evidently ripe for poetry.
So it worked soooo well for me, the personal, the political and I loved the third part of it the most, about wounds and healing. I mentioned some poems in the notes. Here are some more I loved: 'solidarity', 'Nehanda taught me', 'is that all you got', 'unhurt', 'the giving tree' and 'I say I love you'. My favorite one has to be 'selah' though, it's a wonderful love poem and watching Monet reading it, I first got the goosebumps pretty bad and then I cried. It's just that good.
I was fortunate enough to be at Monet's reading in Bucharest a couple of years ago, a reading that made me cry and made me feel angry and made me feel hopeful and I can't find a better way to describe this book.
It's intensely personal and intensely political and the poems even go to pretty radical and challenging places, which... I want more of. Like the poem that is fiercely compassionate about her grandma leaving her kids behind to escape Cuba. Or the one about Christopher Dorner ('whistleblower'), the black cop who wrote a manifesto against the police and then shot some police officers and some family members. It's a hugely complex situation that the media simplified (obvs), but one that's evidently ripe for poetry.
So it worked soooo well for me, the personal, the political and I loved the third part of it the most, about wounds and healing. I mentioned some poems in the notes. Here are some more I loved: 'solidarity', 'Nehanda taught me', 'is that all you got', 'unhurt', 'the giving tree' and 'I say I love you'. My favorite one has to be 'selah' though, it's a wonderful love poem and watching Monet reading it, I first got the goosebumps pretty bad and then I cried. It's just that good.