The Span of a Small Forever: Poems
Description
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
With breathtaking lyricism and a vulnerability that pierces the heart, April Gibson journeys through the emotional abysses, the daily pleasures, the frustrations, and the joys of being a Black woman living with chronic illness.
Gibson offers a unique perspective on “the body,” viewing disability and healthcare through both feminist and socio-economic lenses filtered by race and faith. Through gorgeous sensory language that migrates memories, from carefree innocence to the ravages formed in its absence, Gibson bears witness to grief, courage, and resistance to redefine herself on her own terms.
Gibson presents her body as a “looking glass” that re-envisions illness, womanhood, motherhood, religious relics and collective loss through her physicality, through her lamenting, through her unearthing, reckoning and rebirth. Not only do we see her, but see the “we” in her. The Span of a Small Forever is both testimony and transformation—heart-shattering in its honesty, it ultimately offers us transcendent beauty, nourishment, and the strength we need to go on in our lives.
Praise for The Span of a Small Forever: Poems
“The poet April Gibson heard us when we pleaded how we needed something new. She felt the shift in the wind when we reached for something revelatory bare. The Span of a Small Forever is a book for the unsung. . . This testimony takes us to the scary basement of self-discovery. After reading, we all will become closer to the small and mighty miracles within. The Span of a Small Forever is no small book, and the poems that make up this fine collection are not small songs.”
— —Derrick Harriell, author of Cotton and Ropes
“The Span of a Small Forever is the unpretentious feat of a writer with a crystalline vision. Gibson’s dexterous music underscores her stories of black girlhood and womanhood from escaping church to teen pregnancy and triumph despite the medical industrial complex’s failures. This collection of poems centers self-love, reclamation of this woman’s power, and the highs and lows of motherhood hollered from the Southside of Chicago despite the ravages of Crohn's disease, racism, and naysayers. Gibson is a tough and tender somebody, whose pen illuminates illness and the radiance of the small beauties in everyday life.”
— —Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love
