Racing Hummingbirds

by Jeanann Verlee

Overview

Racing Hummingbirds examines, critiques, and at times delights in one woman's navigation through the many worlds of manic depression and her struggle to maintain humanity in the process. Jeanann Verlee's award-winning debut collection is a series of narratives, prayers, and conjurings which address gender, sex, race, poverty, heartbreak, and survival with such stark intimacy, you will find yourself living inside. These poems cannot possibly be about you, yet they are. They cross boundaries and reclaim hope. They are as the opening poem suggests, nothing short of communion. Fierce and formidable, Jeanann Verlee is poised to make an indelible mark – much like a razor slashing silk – on what's become a comfortably placid poetic landscape. Her unflinching and uncompromising stanzas will change the way you move through the world. -Patricia Smith, “Blood Dazzler” Any storyteller can recount powerful experience [she] makes you feel something powerful is happening in the telling. It is when safety dissolves that we discover possibility...It’s a special person that will make you wish they were your villain. -Brian S. Ellis, “Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom" ...a roller coaster of imagistic magic. Form, language, allusion, and voice interact, collide, shape-shift, and duel...throughout an utterly arresting mosaic. -Danse Macabre Magazine

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935904908
Publisher:	Write Bloody Publishing
Publication date:	10/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	847,778
File size:	556 KB

About the Author

Richard Swift (born Ricardo Sigilfredo Olivarez Swift-Ochoa)(March 16, 1977) is an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and short-film maker. He is the founder, owner, and recording engineer of National Freedom, a recording studio located in Oregon, and has worked as producer for such acts as Damien Jurado, The Mynabirds, and Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab fame. He is one of the greatest recording artists of our time.

Read an Excerpt

the telling

She is a tornado.
He is a man. He is solid and humble.
She tells the story three times, convinced
he does not understand. He is trying.
The story is about an elephant and a mermaid.
No, the story is about a millipede in a thicket of roses,
a prized buckskin horse and fifty lashes.
She is talking gibberish. He is trying to understand but she
is thunderbolt. Her tongue, a spear.
The dog is hiding in the back corner of a dark room.
The man wants to sit with the dog. She is melting.
Her face pools in her lap. Freckles pile at her feet.
There is nothing in the room that has not been hurled.
She is science like this. An atom, separating.
Finally, the story comes, like flood. Its mud seeps in
from under the doorjambs, rising. They are standing
ankle deep in water and sludge. He understands now.
He is a spiced wound. He wants firearms. Hit-men. A brutal justice.
All the while, the window is sitting with its mouth open,
spilling their hot storm into the courtyard,
where the neighbors have come to their sills,
elbows propped, hungry
like vultures.

Editorial Reviews

Fierce and formidable, Jeanann Verlee is poised to make an indelible mark — much like a razor slashing silk — on what's become a comfortably placid poetic landscape. Her unflinching and uncompromising stanzas will change the way you move through the world.

-Patricia Smith

Any storyteller can recount powerful experience [she] makes you feel something powerful is happening in the telling. It is when safety dissolves that we discover possibility...It's a special person that will make you wish they were your villain.

–Brian S. Ellis

...a roller coaster of imagistic magic. Form, language, allusion, and voice interact, collide, shape-shift, and duel...throughout an utterly arresting mosaic.

–Danse Macabre Magazine

From the Publisher