Black Wings and Blind Angels: Poems by Sapphire

From Barnes & Noble

Poet, performance artist, and author of the acclaimed novel Push, Sapphire returns with a new collection of poems that takes the reader into America's past and present, bearing testimony to the black experience in a country fragmented by war, racism, and urban and domestic violence. In Black Wings & Blind Angels Sapphire explores a wide range of provocative subjects, from the origins of celebrity and desire to lesbian separatism to childhood sexual abuse to the "justified genocide" of American Indians. In addition, "Breaking Karma (Nos. 5 through 9)" continues the sequence begun in her first book of poetry, American Dreams, and the "Gorilla in the Midst" poems, satiric vignettes that began as a meditation on the infamous racism of the Los Angeles Police Department, confront "sexual stereotypes, issues of power, and racism."

From the Publisher

Alive with the emotional honesty and intellectual force for which Sapphire has been admired as both a writer and a performance artist, these forty-seven poems take us into America's past and present, bearing testimony to the black experience in a country fragmented by war, racism, and urban and domestic violence. They tell the story of a search for the complicated spiritual path back to one's roots, a story of family, race, and self-transformation.

The Advocate - Richard Tayson

In Black Wings & Blind Angels Sapphire hammers pain until it is the shape of hope. Her poetic voice is evolving, but Sapphire is still on target. It is a must for poetry fans.

Publishers Weekly

Sapphire became a semi-celebrity for the harsh poems of abuse and recovery in her first book, American Dreams; she then made waves for the huge advance on her novel Push. This second volume of verse finds her less aggressive, mixing her hostilities and anxieties with a newly bemused nostalgia. A long prose piece portrays God as a Samoan woman who greets Sapphire's abusive father in Heaven, explaining that he has been saved because he helped his daughter succeed: "You're dead Daddy and your girl she works for me, God." Where an older persona-poem had Sapphire speak with the voice of Tina Turner, a new one has her impersonating Michael Jackson, gloating, "I buy those old songs of John & Paul / & Ringo & sell 'em for dog food commercials. I am rich." The poet declares elsewhere "It is clear/ I was not cut out for bulldyking or prostitution now"; about a lover, she explains, "I am not four, his penis/ is not my father's. My father is dead, it's my life now." Among the free-verse persona poems Sapphire even strews a few sestinas. This isn't to say she's gone soft: as in Push, her compulsively consumable stories of trauma explore the far reaches of hell before coming up for air and angels. As if to remind us that she's still dangerous, one of the volume's central images is a so-called Indian wolf trap- a salt lick that hides a razor. These poems won't convert those who dislike Sapphire's work already, and they might alienate her fans; the undecided, however, may find more clarity here than in her earlier work, and thus more means for engagement. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Sapphire's brutally honest Push may have won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist award in 1997, but she is best known as a poet of slick-talking, nearly hallucinatory riffs on growing up poor, tough, and black in America. Spiky and uncompromising, her new poems promise more of the same. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0679446303
  
• ISBN-13: 9780679446309
• Format: Hardcover, 144pp
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: September 1999
• Edition Description: 1 ED
• Edition Number: 1

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Breaking Karma #5

i

It is like a scene in a play.
His bald spot shines upward between dark tufts of hair.
We are sitting in a pool of light on the plastic
covered couch, Ernestine, his last live-in,
ended up with. But that is the end.
We are sitting in the beginning of our lives now
looking at our father upright in his black
reclining chair. It's four of us then, children,
new to Los Angeles--drugs, sex, Watts burning,
Aretha, Michael Jackson, the murder of King,
haven't happened yet.
He is explaining how things will be--
Which one will cook, which one will clean.
"Your mama," he announces, "is not coming."
Two thousand miles away in the yellow
linoleum light of her kitchen, my mother
is sitting in the easy tan-colored man's lap.
Kissing him. Her perfect legs golden like
whiskey, his white shirt rolled up arms that
surround her like the smell of cake baking.
"Forget about her," my father's voice drops like
a curtain, "she doesn't want you. She never did."

ii

Holding the photograph by its serrated edges, staring,
I know the dark grey of her lips is "Jubilee Red"
her face brown silk. I start with the slick
corner of the photograph, put it in my mouth like it's
pizza or something. I close my eyes, chew, swallow.


"Breaking Karma #6"

I'm in the movies now playing the part
of the girl who broke my heart.
My mouth, strobe-light pink, bounces off blue sequins.
Behind me the Stones sing "Miss You," hollering,
"There's some Puerto Rican girls around the corner
just dying to meet chu."
In the wings a white boy in a wheelchair moans,
"Oh operator pleaseget straight."
SHE takes the stage now. Big yella gal.
Daddy was a wop. Mama was a nigger.
She's a singer. With a voice hot semi-liquid rock.
Her heels are hills, cobalt blue melting like
her dress into the firm breasts, fat hips & belly
of Black Los Angeles.
"Let's burn down the corn field," SHE wails.
It's 1968. Tito, Michael, Randy & Cato
are dancing down rows of rainbow colored corn
when a voice comes over the loud speaker:
There will be no ambulances tonight.
"We'll make love, we'll make love while it burns,"
SHE screams like Howlin' Wolf, like Jay Hawkins,
like Hank Williams, like Van Gogh's windmill,
like the severed ear of black wind in a plate
of pigtails & pink beans,

like that bridge in Connecticut that collapsed
under the center of air shaking like
change in a cup.
SHE stands like the big legs of a nuclear plant
cracked at the base melting down a room full
of $3hr assembly line workers who hear her
& shout, "Honey Hush!" & the crack in their
mother's back becomes a sidewalk, then a road
leading to a peach tree in "Georgy"
or a pear tree in Florida.
I'm eating popcorn & watching a Mexican
dump a drunk paraplegic BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY
in the desert his granddad rolled over
a century ago killing for gold.
At the side of the road an Okie girl,
selling peanuts & semiprecious gems,
hands me three pieces of black obsidian,
called "Apache Tears," the Okie girl drawls,
"'cause after the cavalry massacred their men,
the Native women cried so hard
their tears turned black, then to stone."
Inside the theater the screen fills up
with a fat half breed burning, gasoline
in a blue dress. SHE picks up a

microphone & in a book she hasn't read yet
a white boy in a rented room puts
his eyes out with lye. "I rather!" SHE shouts.
"Tell it!" the audience shouts back. "Umm hmm,"
like the wind trapped in a slave castle SHE moans,
"I rather go blind," the screen melts white
drips down her face & disappears,
"than see you--"