Some books defy categories. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by poet Camille T. Dungy pushes the limits of what readers might expect from…
part of my fixation with textured and torqued language . . . stems from growing up in the South, where figurative language isn’t limited to formal literary spaces.
I’ve learned by now my mind is smarter than I am, than my conscious self—it’s doing all sorts of things in there, unbeknownst to me. I often tell my students that the poem knows better than I do, and so I shouldn’t be arrogant enough to think I’m in control.
Thinking in terms of the poetry of your life is about noticing that you are one of the sentient beings in a universe with billions of galaxies, and your experience is the universe knowing itself and it is weird and messy and painful but it matters.
Horses are a nice metaphor for the sonnet’s strength and feeling in motion. Beauty and violent power come together in an animal form. When I write, I have the feeling of being a rider. As the poem gallops forward, I am knocked about.