Gumbo YA YA: Poems

By Aurielle Marie

Weaving together a quilt from Ebonics, Deep Southern tradition and a courageous intimacy, Aurielle Marie's Gumbo Ya Ya defends Black girlhood with her bare hands, opening each brilliant wound with a dignity and urgency that guts this poetry debut. In a collection that is as much a war song as it is a complicated love letter, these poems rouse devastating imagery with the same humid persistence of Marie's native Atlanta. Gumbo Ya Ya reveals the dexterity of language, time, and ancestry at each masterful shift. Grounded in historical context and pop-cultural orientation, Marie's work manages to maintain a lyricism that bends even time to her will. Gumbo Ya Ya chews into the motifs of Aurielle's childhood with a beauty that pulsates devastatingly between honeysuckle and houselessness, her father's flaws, and the struggle to affirm the humanity of girls the world would rather discard. Who is a Black girl without the weight of her grief? What waits to be discovered at the intersection of joy and trauma, of holiness and ritual? Marie's disregard for "propa talk" provokes readers to lean into a world of her own making: one that contemporizes folklore, makes holy of the secular, and approaches forgiveness from a host of wounds. The poet charms as much as she astonishes, she tends to the wounds of her readers as often as she does herself, all the while fiercely praising the legacy of Black women's survival and resistance. Gumbo Ya Ya retrieves ancestors from their graves, honors the inheritance of maternal ferocity and dares to make intimate, the labor of forgiveness. More than magic and heartier than the seafood stew of her childhood, Gumbo Ya Ya serves what everyone hungers for: a girl allowed her full spectrum, in this coming-of-age retelling like no other.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 194934200X
• ISBN13: 9781949342000
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
• Length: 100 Pages