From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, Lisbeth White’s debut collection AMERICAN SYCAMORE examines the Black diaspora, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine.
AMERICAN SYCAMORE is an exploration of racial identity and the natural world, rooted in the mythopoetics of wilderness and ancestry as sources of trauma, grief, wonder, and tremendous resource. In pursuit of understanding the nuances of belonging and displacement in a Black mixed-race feminine body, Lisbeth White travels through mythic, biological, and geological landscapes, attending to the body and its beautiful and terrifying questions. Her journey manifests in a poetic helix of recurring bridges, trees, myths, origins, and awakenings. From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, these poems traverse global terrain while interrogating the dark past/present of America. In AMERICAN SYCAMORE, the poet examines the Black diaspora, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine, inviting the reader into a deep conversation of seeking and recovery.
“The poems in AMERICAN SYCAMORE are talismans, and we need them for the long journey toward belonging somewhere and somehow. For a White, Black mixed-race poet, the body is a battleground for myth and action, her ‘whole body / a cross-referenced wound.’ This is a book of travel and the restlessness of the human spirit to incorporate an inheritance of competing stories. What struck me was the need in this poet to take on the daunting task of healing a legacy of slavery and racism within herself, to find the right apology for all of us. We need to sit up and take notice here. AMERICAN SYCAMORE is a fine book.”–Amber Flora Thomas, Eye of Water: Poems
“This book with its forehead to the earth. A book of tears. A book of grief. A book of resource. How Lisbeth White listens for the messages of dirt and bones, reminding me that word is sound, breath, mark–gesture ‘to make a sudden temple.’ I follow her into the gorgeous greenness of her questions–‘how long can filament grow / in the memory of hands?’ and ‘didn’t we live / as a forest…’–and find myself closer to my own life, reaching and reaching toward reunion.”–Aracelis Girmay, the black maria
“Early in her book AMERICAN SYCAMORE, made of poems as formally adventurous and probing and searching as the questions she asks, questions that might never be answered–about family, history, empire, violence, love–Lisbeth White writes, almost as a kind of prayer: ‘the bones the bones know who i am.’The bones of course are the literal bones–of who came before us, of who loved us before we were born, of who were brutalized in the uncountable, unsayable ways. But the bones are also the poems she has crafted. Which is to say, what music she’s grown from the sorrow.”–Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women’s Studies.
