Description
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Harmony Holiday's tête-bêche book-length lyric essay collection GO FIND YOUR FATHER/A FAMOUS BLUES immerses itself and its readers in a deeply personal interrogation of perhaps the most difficult subjects of all: love and family legacy. Holiday addresses these topics in verse, prose, and, most affectingly, in letters to her father—the late singer-songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Through these notes as well as her poems bearing long, ambitious, uncompromising lines, Holiday explores how we distill our own identities from memories and responsibilities bound up in tenderness and violence.
"Do any black children grow up casual? Naw, we grow up shipped, knowing that we are loved but knowing more than that, that terror, that knowing is scrawled money for our bank. We're sure-shot and avoided, singing blue devil blues like a black and blue disciple, out from Sallis, Attala off delta, change-played, flowed to that subcommon up-river fate, our Waterloo and phonic quarry, step-sharp, sharp-squared, strait-shawled, boot-sharp visitor, made for walking, talking remnant of an extra-impossible accord, then Los Angeles. Resonances and renascence of everywhere we come from, Harmony, deepest Holiday since Jason, since Jimmy, having gone to find him, makes these missive runs, assured of her allure but running from and in that into open, unsure dream. She sees it's getting late. Her archive has a microtonal blush. Sightsound, as Russell Atkins says. Can you say what it is to sing a song of love I can show you, right here, ask me now."—Fred Moten
Author Bio
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, director, and the author of A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM (Birds, LLC, 2019), THE BLACK SAINT AND THE SINNERMAN (Fonograf Editions, 2018) HOLLYWOOD FOREVER (Fence Books, 2017), GO FIND YOUR FATHER / A FAMOUS BLUES (Ricochet Editions, 2014) and NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL (Fence Books, 2011). She founded and runs Afrosonics, an archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics and Mythscience a publishing imprint that reissues and reprints work from the archive. She worked on the SOS, the selected poems of Amiri Baraka, transcribing all of his poetry recorded with jazz that had yet to be released in print and exists primarily on out-of-print records and she is now editing a collection of his plays. Harmony studied Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and taught for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She received her MFA from Columbia University and has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a NYFA fellowship. She is currently completing a book of poems called M a … f a and an accompanying collection of essays and memoir, Love is War for Miles, both to be released this fall, as well as a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln. Her work is deeply rooted by Black music, and collective improvisation with Black people, in the tradition of her father who was a Northern Soul singer and songwriter and introduced her to artists he worked with like Ray Charles, The Staples Singers, and Bobby Womack.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA