Presenting...Sister No Blues
Presenting...Sister No Blues
Hattie Gossett has tempered what could be considered a bellicose insanity with biting creativity to arrive at this collection of sharp critiques on the world she inhabits. She understands and resents being "a female wage slave who has had a lifetime of mostly thankless jobs and who wants out of the rat race while she still has enough creativity left to breathe life into the projects she has been dreaming." At once narrative and journalistic, poetic and academic, satirical and compassionate, her poem-vignettes need only a live reading by the author to embue them with the electricity of the life reality about which they testify so unerringly. Sister No Blues is but one of the archetypical females that Hattie Gossett recreates from the clay of history, oppression, and disenfranchisement; then, she reshapes the images through the knowledge of their dogged resurrections in the likes of poets such as herself. Not since the 1960s has a poet sounded so genuinely perturbed at the state of the world. But Gossett is not a repetition of a literary era; she is a continuation of it. "Sister Salvation" and Mrs. King Kong of the poem "king kong! kingg kongg!! kinggg konggg!!!" are fresh portraits unavailable for scrutiny in the sixties, as are the lady bus drivers who sit more frequently at the economic wheel because their seats were assured by Rosa Parks and Sojourner Truth: "back at ya I & 2." Hattie Gossett's Presenting ... Sister No Blues is the paean of an irreverent, bodacious, outrageous, vigilant, militant, and free black woman. She does not bite her tongue when the truth is hers to tell. She is a woman after my own heart, a kindred warrior with word weapons that defend a "spirit [that) couldn't take no more." She breaks grammatical convention, extends margins, truncates lines, uses upper case and lower case at will, spaces as her muse dictates, and generally breaks the rules as she travels the acid road of her art kicking and cursing, soothsaying and disclosing. And as she wams in one poem, so must I: Sister No Blues is "not recommended for the weakminded, weakhearted or those with bloodpressure troubles." - From Independent Publisher