Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Poems

Jennifer Givhan

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781610756105
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

"A poet of great heart and brave directness."

—Billy Collins

In Protection Spell Jennifer Givhan explores the guilt, sadness, and freedom of relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on for no reason other than love, the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life and to each other despite the pain (or perhaps because of it). These poems reassemble safe spaces from the fissures cleaving the speaker's own biracial home and act as witnesses speaking to the racial iniquity of our broader social landscape as well as to the precarious standpoint of a mother-woman of color whose body lies vulnerable to trauma and abuse. From insistent moments of bravery, a collection of poems arises that asks the impossible, like the childhood chant that palliates suffering by demanding nothing less than magical healing: sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanas mañana (the frog who loses his tail is commanded to grow another). In the end, Givhan's verse offers a place where healing may begin.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• My God, Nieve
• The Polar Bear
• Protection Spell (Riot’s Eye)
• Race in America
• Prayer
• The Glance
• Mrs. Bitterstout
• The Problem with My Eyes
• The Perennials
• English 20: Developmental Writing
• Carrying Baby
• The Cheerleaders
• Cemetery Nights
• The Trial
• The Empathy Machine
• Prayer Remix
• Half Mexican
• Resfeber (Re-Membering Trauma)
• An Editor Advised Me to Stop Writing Mother Bird Poems
• Mrs. Francis Na Kai at the Birthday Party
• Ars Poetica after Baby Lyuba
• Volver (Bride Price)
• Fernweh (At Gorge Bridge, Taos NM)
• First Light in Tahoe City
• Reverse: Ten Years of Marriage
• Reupholstering a Chair
• Snakes-Her-Skirt
• The First Time
• Curanderisma
• Junkyard Halflight
• Santiago’s Song
• Safe
• Manju Speaks
• Inca Ice Maiden, Momia Juanita
• Earth
• I Believed All Poets Were Dead
• Easter Sunday
• Rehab
• In the Shower with Sunday after Watching Lost
• Sunday Night Shift
• Safe (One Boy)
• In the Emergency Room
• Abiyoyo
• In the Beginning
• The Accusation
• Funk You Up
• Machine for Second Chances
• Elegy, for Sunday