A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing
The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Nominated for an NAACP Image Award
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title for the season
Booklist's Top 10 Diverse Nonfiction titles for the year
BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections"
Most Anticipated Books of the Year--The Rumpus, Nylon
A revelatory work in the tradition of Claudia Rankine's Citizen, DaMaris Hill's searing and powerful narrative-in-verse bears witness to American women of color burdened by incarceration.
"It is costly to stay free and appear / sane."
From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes, illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout.
For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era's prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social, intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and lethal.
In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, Hill presents bitter, unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet unbridled African-American women. Hill's passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their load and light, binding history, author, and reader in an essential legacy of struggle.
*The Sentencing Project
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Through poetic memoir, biographical sketches, and archival black-and-white photographs, Hill's first full-length collection gives voice to the history of black women in the United States who have undergone incarceration and oppression. To be bound suggests to be trapped; however, Hill's poems illustrate how oppression can summon inner-strength, resistance, and revolution. While many of the freedom fighters spotlighted in the collection endured tragedy, Hill suggests it would be limiting to label these figures as tragic or doomed. Their narratives are not cautionary tales of defeat, but nuanced testaments of survival and ascension. In "Miz Lucille (an echo poem for Ms. Clifton)," Hill writes, "i stand up/ in the world that gift wrapped me for ruin/ i stand up/ and mark the script." Hill's deep admiration for poet and mentor Lucille Clifton serves as a touchstone, a way to rise above everyday struggles. In "Claudia Jones," Hill envisions the activist and writer's story as one of redemption: "How many/ ways did you write women? How / many ways did you right women?" For Hill, a bound woman overcomes oppression through her legacy.
