"With a wonderfully discerning focus on the lives of working-class Black Americans, Nzadi Keita's
Migration Letters [is] beautifully imagined, carefully considered. This collection, page by page, develops an elaborate portrait of a place and a people during the last sixty years. Though set in Philadelphia, these poems will compel all readers to reflect upon their upbringings, as well as on the intricate puzzle of elements that shaped and sustained their lives. With language that is both lyrical and unflinching,
Migration Letters recalls the jagged, somewhat miraculous journey that each of us has taken."
–Tim Seibles, author of
Voodoo Libretto "M. Nzadi Keita has given us a long-breath song of Black witness, missed kisses, and love's labors lost, longed for, and remembered.
Migration Letters summons life from clay and concrete and loam, reconfigures it into lyric, stanza, testimony."
–Jabari Asim, author of
Yonder "As if entering a darkroom, Sister M. Nzadi Keita has entered the silences surrounding Black working-class migrants, transforming their lives, and carved that quiet, steady living into photographs. We see their journeys out of Southern kitchens and sawmills to Philadelphia homes and churches, newly integrated schools, resonant Civil Rights trauma, and college campuses. Into these disregarded interiors, her poems breathe air. As in her previous book,
Brief Evidence of Heaven, Sister Keita again displays powerful attention to voice, intimate and constant, even as speakers and subjects shift. We hear the complex Blues across these journeys and we, too, become travelers."
–Sonia Sanchez
"How do we make a city with a name like 'Philadelphia' work for us when Philadelphia makes it hard for our blue-collar fathers to go to work?
Migration Letters is a book of poems that has at its heart the question of cognitive dissonance in Black people who survive, participate, and thrive in an America they cannot fully trust. This dissonance is often best articulated through Keita's use of synesthesia and other moments that move toward the surreal in a book of plain-spoken poetry about what is often all too real: 'Gold/you hear. Gold/you crave.'
Migration Letters is a love letter straight from Keita's heart."
–Jericho Brown, author of
The Tradition
