I’d also carried around Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems, edited by Kevin Young, because I was working on photographs about black women’s bodies, identities, and the presence and interruption of landscape in terms of blackness. While working on a photography project in Oxford, Miss., last summer I reread William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Eudora Welty’s On Writing. And, in my travels, I often looked out for marvelous independent bookstores where I would then pick up more books, often shipping them back to Brooklyn when I realized I’d be charged at the airport for being over the weight restrictions.
Sometimes I’d get frustrated because I couldn’t remember names of favorites characters or the way those characters in those books had once made me feel, so I’d go back and reread them. I considered how landscapes affected my mood and how, of course, a voracious grief devoured everything. I began thinking of books and geography, literally and psychically. I wrangled slim volumes of poetry into my camera bag, which was stuffed with lenses, notebooks, and a watercolor set. And so, many books crossed state lines, their spines shifting in mile-high altitudes and time zones. But I cared about books and knew there were certain books I needed to have with me should I wake up, inconsolable, in a hotel room on the other side of the country. Everything I wore was mostly black so I didn’t think or care about clothes at all. I also returned to Toi Derricotte’s The Undertaker’s Daughter.īeing on the road on tour for my own book, I often filled my suitcase with more books than clothing. Alexander’s book gave me hope and I picked up Tracy K. Reading that book gave me hope that I too could survive and celebrate life itself. The book left me speechless in its love, grace, and dignity. One of the best books I read last year and have returned to more than once is Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World. I also consumed books where grief, loss, rebirth, and death were implicit, distilled, expanded into unbelievable landscapes I hadn’t seen or understood as clearly before, in the surreal afterlife of my mother’s absence. Kind friends and kind strangers alike sent me specific titles regarding grief. And, honestly, it was difficult to navigate a space that suddenly felt inarticulate to me. In 2015, I also had a book of my own published. I didn’t and couldn’t go out there, the world was glaring in its surface of sameness, but books were ultimately part of the company that drew me out of a space that was dangerous, expanding in its withdrawal and silence. It was all I wanted to do, all I was capable of doing, because all I wanted was to live inside of sentences, stanzas, stories. Other weeks it was reading alone that comforted me. Often, my habit and love for reading felt unbearable and foreign.
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