What Had Happened Was

by Therï Alyce Pickens

Overview

In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478031499
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Therí Alyce Pickens is Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana at Bates College and author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, also published by Duke UniversityPress, and New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States.

Table of Contents

This
On This Day  2
The Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death  3
On March 12, 2020, Breonna Taylor  5
On Losing; A Hypothesis  6
Customary Calculus for Chronicity  7
Getting Dressed  9
Depression, Jacob Lawrence, 1950  10
If Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t had his heart attack  11
Remember the episode of Bones when  12
Ode to Checking My Shit  13
Anatomy of Soap  15
my lover says (my mind)  17
I found out I have something  18
Ursa Corregidora and Mary J. Blige Contemplate Life without Children  19
That
Dispatches from the Pediatric Floor  22
Collar Is What Hangs around the Neck  23
I am watching a documentary about food, again  25
Corona Poem  26
T  27
On sex  28
Palimpsestina  29
The Amateur Gardener Contemplates Trauma  31
Apostrophe to Inspiration  32
Chronically Ill  34
On recompense  35
I tell her some of her ancestors must have snitched on Harriet Tubman  36
What You Don’t See When Ben Vereen Guest Stars as Will’s Father on The Fresh Prince, May 1994  37
Mind You
What Had Happened Was  40
& The Third
Variation on a Theme  56
Potential Ode or Elegy Out My Window  57
Neighborhood Watch  58
Coming Home  59
Ranunculus  61
It was just before Thanksgiving  62
June, 1018  63
Ursa Corregidora Goes to Junior High in the 1990s  64
Some Suicide Are Slow  65
I got into a Twitter beef with Lolo Jones over a blind white girl  67
What Cliff Should Have Told Theo on the Pilot of The Cosby Show, September 1984  68
Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Simon Godwin, National Theatre, 2019  70
my lover says (he doesn’t remember)  72
I meet a man with a stutter  73
Let Me Holla at You Right Quick; or Notes  75
I Ain’t Forgot about Y’all; or Acknowledgments  81

Editorial Reviews

In this engaging new collection of poetry, Therí Alyce Pickens demonstrates that she is a poet of depth, range, and often incisive humor. Her poems are a revelation.

Punks: New and Selected Poems - John Keene

What Had Happened Was is a daring poet’s debut. First and foremost, I want to praise Therí Alyce Pickens’s collection for its unflinching attention to the nuances of—and everyday sorts of elaborate formal play embedded in—African American vernacular. It’s truly refreshing, and energizing, to see the dynamism of Black linguistic expression live a full life in contemporary American poetry this way. It’s all here. Love and loss, theory and autobiography, the ordinary and the transcendent.

Spoken Word: A Cultural History - Joshua Bennett

Therí Alyce Pickens writes a poetics of the body that considers history, politics, race, gender, and the everyday mundane ways that they are experienced in bones, in the brain, and on the skin. While reading through What Had Happened Was, you may find that this Black poetics is crip poetics, is what people call the confessional voice. What Pickens confesses of the body is how the world makes the body a question. If you understand in depth the expression, the answer is in how one would begin: “What had happened was . . .

Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought - Bettina Judd

In this engaging new collection of poetry, Therí Alyce Pickens demonstrates that she is a poet of depth, range, and often incisive humor. Her poems are a revelation.”—John Keene, author of, Punks: New and Selected Poems

“What Had Happened Was is a daring poet’s debut. First and foremost, I want to praise Therí Alyce Pickens’s collection for its unflinching attention to the nuances of—and everyday sorts of elaborate formal play embedded in—African American vernacular. It’s truly refreshing, and energizing, to see the dynamism of Black linguistic expression live a full life in contemporary American poetry this way. It’s all here. Love and loss, theory and autobiography, the ordinary and the transcendent.”—Joshua Bennett, author of, Spoken Word: A Cultural History

“Few debut poetry books are long awaited. Without a doubt, What Had Happened Was is. When you work tirelessly and patiently to master your art—with skill, wisdom, and an abundance of imagination—it reads like this.”—Hayan Charara, author of, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems

“Therí Alyce Pickens writes a poetics of the body that considers history, politics, race, gender, and the everyday mundane ways that they are experienced in bones, in the brain, and on the skin. While reading through What Had Happened Was, you may find that this Black poetics is crip poetics, is what people call the confessional voice. What Pickens confesses of the body is how the world makes the body a question. If you understand in depth the expression, the answer is in how one would begin: “What had happened was . . .”—Bettina Judd, author of, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought

“In her constantly surprising and deftly built poems, Therí Alyce Pickens enacts a poetics that refuses binaries, attends to and extends the power of Black art, and centers a body navigating illness. Pickens seamlessly moves through and braids memory, history, pop culture. The language is precise and remarkable; it will engage and entangle you in marvelous ways—as will the formally inventive poems and the structure itself. Pickens has written an electric first book. The poems are still sparking in my mind.”—Eduardo C. Corral, author of, Guillotine: Poems

"This collection demands attention and introspection by offering a raw yet eloquent portrayal of the intersections of history, identity, and systemic oppression. It’s an essential read for people seeking to honor the complexity of the experiences of Black Americans."—Jessica Calaway, Library Journal

From the Publisher

Few debut poetry books are long awaited. Without a doubt, What Had Happened Was is. When you work tirelessly and patiently to master your art—with skill, wisdom, and an abundance of imagination—it reads like this.

These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems - Hayan Charara

"This collection demands attention and introspection by offering a raw yet eloquent portrayal of the intersections of history, identity, and systemic oppression. It’s an essential read for people seeking to honor the complexity of the experiences of Black Americans."

Library Journal - Jessica Calaway

In her constantly surprising and deftly built poems, Therí Alyce Pickens enacts a poetics that refuses binaries, attends to and extends the power of Black art, and centers a body navigating illness. Pickens seamlessly moves through and braids memory, history, pop culture. The language is precise and remarkable; it will engage and entangle you in marvelous ways—as will the formally inventive poems and the structure itself. Pickens has written an electric first book. The poems are still sparking in my mind.

Guillotine: Poems - Eduardo C. Corral