Dear Girl

Poetry. African American Studies. DEAR GIRL: A RECKONING revisits the biography of 18th century poet Phillis Wheatley and reimagines her journey through the Middle Passage to Boston. The poems are a gathering of ghosts whose voices shift from slaver to enslaved, from the mouths of the sacred to haunted dreamer. Echoes of loss and fracture each peer into silences and gaps to uncover narratives of restoration. The poems are letters and mausoleums, voices of ghosts interspersed with theories of transgenerational trauma, that take on a range of forms and innovative strategies that visualize not only grief but a range of possibilities for healing. DEAR GIRL: A RECKONING is a book of conjure that aims to call and quell ghosts of a past not past.