A more perfect Union

by Teri Ellen Cross Davis

Finalist, 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

In the tender, sensual, and bracing poems of  a more perfect Union ,  Teri Ellen Cross Davis reclaims the experience of living and mothering while Black in contemporary America, centering Black women’s pleasure by wresting it away from the relentless commodification of the White gaze. Cross Davis deploys stunning emotional range to uplift the mundane, interrogate the status quo, and ultimately create her own goddesses. Parenting, lust, household chores—all are fair game for Cross Davis’s gimlet eye. Whether honoring her grief for Prince’s passing while examining his role in midwifing her sexual awakening or contemplating travel and the gamble of being Black across this wide world, these poems tirelessly seek a path out of the labyrinth to hope.

Genres: Poetry, Race

84 pages, Paperback

First published February 10, 2021

About the author

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is a Cave Canem fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and has attended the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is on the Advisory Council of Split This Rock (a biennial poetry festival in Washington DC) and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. Her work can be read in many anthologies and journals including Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Natural Bridge, Torch, Poet Lore, and North American Review. Her first collection Haint was published in June, 2016 by Gival Press. She lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.

Reviews

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

a more perfect Union by Teri Ellen Cross Davis was a roller coaster of emotions, as it should be. It begs readers to see the America we are from the perspective of someone we are not (or even may be) and whose history we do share (even if we ignore it) in order to elicit empathy and action. We’re beyond the platitudes here. We are in the thick of the struggle, and we are called to action.

Read the full review: https://savvyverseandwit.com/2021/06/...

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved these urgent poems about race and motherhood in America.
Here are some lines from the poem, Knucklehead:

My son's head is a fist
rapping against the door of the world.
For now, it's dressers, kitchen islands,

dining room tables that coax his clumsy,
creating small molehills of hurt breaching
the surface.//
...
My son cannot continue this path. Black boys
can't lose control at twelve, eighteen, even forty-three.
They don't get do-overs.

So, I let him flail about now,
let him run headfirst into the wall,
learn how unyielding perceptions can be.

Bear the bruising now, before he grows,
enters a world too eager to spill his blood,
too blind to see how red it is.

[eb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for Madwomen poetry class with Emily Mohn Slate, spring 2023.

Loved the theme of music that runs through this collection. Prince, Donna Summers, Led Zeppelin, all have poems about albums, b sides, or songs, and numerous cameos of lyrics or references pop up in other poems.

This book is an unflinching call to arms for Justice in America written by a black woman, without being *only* that. This is a book about the pain of living in a racist society and the work of revolution, but it’s also about travel and music and sex and family.

[Ian Coon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most telling and convicting poetry I have read in years. 10/10 recommend to every American to read.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I’m all your swallowed heat
simmered into flesh.”
from THE GODDESS OF ANGER
.
Desire, movement, place, music, visibility. Teri Ellen Cross Davis paints vivid scenes with her poetry & we get to witness with her. I’ve heard many of these poems multiple times, and they are even more special to sit with on the page.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cross Davis's second collection is such a tender and passionate celebration of herself as a Black woman and mother. Direct, fierce, unhesitant, drawing from a deep well of knowledge and life lived. I love how the poems find their perfect endings.