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Mendi Lewis Obadike
goodreads author profile
website
member since
July 2007
about this author
When I was white I was a man.
My hair was wavy and feathered.
I wore a cowboy hat. (It was
the Seventies. I was a stud.)
I went to bars and picked up girls.
I could have any one I saw.
They bought me drinks and I drank them
then took my favorites home to my
waterbed. I never doubted
this was me. (Even though I was
a small, black girl watching myself
over my shoulder.) I knew what
to whisper in a woman’s ear,
how to wear those bones under my skin,
and did not need to see my face
or recognize my own soft voice.
("One Black Girlhood", from Armor and Flesh)
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avg rating: 4.14
| 7 ratings
| 1 review
| 1 distinct work
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Armor and Flesh by Mendi Lewis Obadike (Goodreads author) avg rating 4.14 — 7 ratings — published 2004 |
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, perform a search.
Armor and Flesh (Poetry)
1 chapters
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updated Aug 04, 2007 02:49AM
description:
"Mendi Obadike pares her poems down to the stark, dark places where self and selves unfurl, confront, and recombine. She understands the art of distillation, both formal and emotional. Yet there is nothing reserved in these rich poems, which emanate from a deep understanding of unsentimental, polyphonic human complexity."
- Elizabeth Alexander
"These cleanly-wrought poems turn the world upside down, inside out. They confirm that nothing is simple. Flesh is complex, relentless in its appearance and changes. Like language (and the glad amazement in the sweat and tears of others) flesh could not long survive without the intricate armor of luck, imagination, and grace, which are the poet's special province."
- Houston A. Baker Jr.
"Language clean as a scalpel opens you to worlds of mysterious, powerful, terrifying life like a surgeon opens the body and reveals the great rivers inside."
- Toi Derricotte
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02/10
Mendi
is currently reading:
Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (Paperback) by Carl Phillips bookshelves: currently-reading |
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02/10
Mendi
is currently reading:
Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (Paperback) by Carl Phillips bookshelves: currently-reading |
my rating:
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Mendi's recent updates (rss)
More of Mendi's books…
""Poetry is language playing with itself." "
— Harryette Mullen
— Harryette Mullen
"Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. "
— Pablo Neruda
— Pablo Neruda
"I always get a little bit irritated when people talk about 'bringing poetry to the people' especially those poet - performers who seem to assume their audience hasn't read anything, as though 'the people' were some ignorant mass incapable of taste. 'Bringing poetry to the people'? Speaking as a people, I go out and get it as long as its available. When people hear any kind of excellence or panache in the use of language in pop songs or movies they notice it, they talk about it. That's because it's available - inescapable, in fact - while my local library is shutting down."
— Michael Donaghy
— Michael Donaghy
"I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration."
— Gwendolyn Brooks
— Gwendolyn Brooks
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