Miscegenation Round Dance is a fierce collection that pierces your heart with ancestral knowledge. It asks questions such as ‘how many ways removed from violence am I through the language of poetry?’ These poems take us through the lived experiences of holding different nations: Black, Indigenous, and settler backgrounds, within one’s body, one’s vessel. Rain dances us through ‘the topography of pain’ and history as the poems help us re-learn and re-write colonial narratives, begging the colonizer to: ‘unoccupy me.’ This is a powerful and unapologetic collection sure to move you at your core.
—Tanaya Winder, author of Words Like Love: Poems and
Why Storms are Named AfterPeople and Bullets Remain Nameless
I first read Miscegenation Round Dance riding shotgun in a minivan on a road trip from San Francisco to DC and back. I read it out loud to the driver, to the creeks, rivers, lakes, rain, rockfalls, and mountain passes. In my mind these poems are a flip book of the faces, the cornfields, waters, and the quiet places we passed around and through on the road. 'This medicine is combustible' says Prud'homme, hands on warp and weft of family. It's not been that long since miscegenation was a crime, identity tied to law, and for some in this country that connection started in the homes of the 'founding fathers.’ These poems dance and ring stories that begin in the blood.”
—Kim Shuck, author of Smuggling Cherokee, Deer Trails, and Exile Heart;
7th PoetLaureate of San Francisco
