Nursery Rhymes in Black: Poems

Nursery Rhymes in Black is a poetic recollection of race, roots, culture, and identity. Paying homage to the memory and work of elders and ancestors, Latorial Faison remembers her own matriarch, mother, grandmother—the rich memories of having grown up in rural, historic Southampton County, Virginia. These poignant poems mark significant moments and tell the lives of the people along the author’s journey through the post-segregation Jim Crow South.

The collection highlights family, overcoming adversity, and endurance from the Black female perspective and celebrates the individuals and experiences that shape life and have catapulted the author into a unique existence. Narrative poems give voice to the Black Southern girlhood experience of being saved, nurtured, inspired, and even challenged by plight and circumstance. Strengthened by her experiences, Faison provides power, courage, and wisdom that resonate deeply. These poems walk in naked truth on a lyrical, musical tightrope as each brings wisdom and honesty in the intimacy of arranged words. Faison takes readers along the development of her own identity, considering stories of unsung heroes, the hands that feed us, the ancestors and traditions that form us, and the challenging ways that race, history, education, and culture intersect. With this spiritually moving collection, Faison joins all poets and writers who have come to prolifically amplify Black voices, to tell Black stories, to continue the Black literary tradition we have been gifted.

In these poems, Faison calls readers into poetic fellowship with the memories, the legacies, the truths of Black women in the South. There is reverence, history, and glory on these pages celebrating the hands, hearts, work, trouble, and ways of Black women and all the ways they teach, become, fascinate, struggle, survive, and exist in the world. Nursery Rhymes in Black lulls us—but not to sleep—rather, to wake up, to speak out, to take a stand, to advocate as we pause to remember, understand, and celebrate.