Bessie’s Resurrection, by Kimberly A. Collins

Description

The remembrance of our Bessies, our cultural mirrors, is sacred in Kimberly Collins’ hands. In Bessie’s Resurrection, her poems urge us to commune with the pain, the irreverence, and the “moaning” trouble of life as only spirited poetry can.

—Joanne V. Gabbin

Kimberly Collins’ three Bessies have the quintessential three b’s of the blues in common: bawdiness, bodaciousness, and beautiful odes to love, lust, and life—and to the audacious ladies she so eloquently brings to life with poems and portraits imbued with such élan, elegance, musical muscularity, and grace. These gospels put a spell on you: from the literate to the profane they make the insane sane and the ugly beautiful again.

—Tony Medina

Even if you can ignore the fact that one is fictional, you can’t ignore the need to connect the interior of these black women’s lives, these Bessies, to each other. From the opening treatise, these poems inform, indict, and interrogate the reader’s memory. This collection walks the reader through a three-headed obsession with the reverberations of a brutal relationship, the “devil’s” music, and a flying machine, as it examines human frailties and weaknesses with the honesty of a hand-held mirror, leaving us wanting and wishing for the prequel or an even closer look at how their stories overlap. Indeed, what about Bessie?

—Frank X Walker

Kimberly A. Collins gave voice to the movement against domestic violence with her poem, “Remember My Name,” which has become a staple of Domestic Violence Awareness Month observances. Collins has facilitated writing-for-healing workshops for almost 30 years. Her inspirational weekly blog became the book Choose You! Wednesday Wisdom to Wake Your Soul. She attended Spelman College and holds a BA from Trinity University, an MFA in poetry from Spalding University, and an MA in American and African American literature from Howard University. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Collins is a Callaloo Fellow, and teaches English and creative writing at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

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