Racing Hummingbirds

by Jeanann Verlee

Overview

Racing Hummingbirds takes readers into one woman's journey through the multifaceted realms of manic depression.

Within these pages, Verlee's award-winning debut collection unfolds as a series of narratives, prayers, and conjurings that fearlessly tackle subjects like gender, sexuality, race, poverty, heartbreak, and the unyielding spirit of survival. The intimacy of her words invites readers to step inside the very heart of these themes, blurring the lines between observer and participant.

As you immerse yourself in the pages of Racing Hummingbirds, you'll find your emotions tapped in to the raw and evocative landscape that Verlee masterfully paints.

Her words create an immersive experience, one where you'll intimately explore the depths of human emotion, from the darkest struggles to the resilient spirit that carries us through.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780984251551
Publisher:	Write Bloody Publishing
Publication date:	04/10/2010
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	569,189
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jeanann Verlee is a poet, editor, activist, and former punk rocker who collects tattoos and winks at boys. Author of Racing Hummingbirds, recipient of the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in Poetry, her work also appears in The New York Quarterly, FRiGG, PANK, and decomP, among others. An acclaimed performance poet, she has represented NYC six times at National Poetry Slam competitions, performs and facilitates workshops across North America, and curates the Urbana Poetry Slam series at the Bowery Poetry Club. She lives in New York City with her dog and a pair of origami lovebirds.

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