Perfect black /Crystal Wilkinson ; illustrated by Ronald W. Davis ; foreword by Nikky Finney.

Includes bibliographies and index.

"From the foreword: "In Perfect Black, Crystal Wilkinson walks us back down the road she first walked as a girl, wanders us through the trees that lined the road where she grew up, where her sensibilities as a woman and a writer were first laid bare. In one of the first poems that opens the collection she is a woman looking back on her life, on the soil and mountains that first stamped the particular sound of her voice and she is deeply inquisitive about how it all fell into place: "The map of me can't be all hills & mountains even though I've been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flat land a time or two." Perfect Black is a book of poems and legends about ancestry, culture, and the terrain of a Black girl becoming. It is a narrow and spacious terrain that enters the bloodstream of this black writing girl's body early. It is a country that she never truly exits even though different zip codes continue to fly through her wild, wondrous, winding life. We read and we hold on too.""--

Front Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Epigraph -- Contents -- Foreword -- Part I -- Terrain -- Baptism (Flatwoods, Kentucky, 1972) -- Cousin -- Untitled -- Asking about My Mother -- The Water Witch on Salvation -- The Water Witch on Invasion -- The Water Witch on Reading -- O Tobacco -- The Visit -- Dig If You Will the Picture -- Slow Dance -- The Creek -- Part II -- My Father Was a City -- Beyond the White Canvas -- August 9, 1974 -- Wet Nurse -- The Bath -- Dropsy -- Death March -- Dear Johnny P -- Mother's Day -- Bones -- Ole Fashioned -- Black Farmer -- Press

Dirge -- Black Body -- A Meditation on Grief: Things We Carry, Things We Remember -- On Being Country -- Part III -- Bloodroot -- Kitchen Ghosts -- Snow Falls Like a Scorned Woman's Tears -- Black and Fat and Perfect -- Witness -- Coming of Age -- Dance -- Homestead -- Heritage -- Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts -- Motherland -- Winter -- Notes and Acknowledgments

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