Urbanshee

In this bold debut, Siaara Freeman reimagines the banshee of Irish lore—a fierce feminine spirit who attends the death of a loved one—as an urban legend, focusing on the death of the speaker’s drug-dealing father, who was killed by gunfire at point-blank. Much of the book examines the wound of that loss, digging through memory like a snagged fingernail anxious for “raw skin with an itch you have / to feel to believe.” In “X Things They Never Tell You About the Drug Dealer’s Daughter,” the speaker channels a child’s misplaced enthusiasm:

                                              My daddy can cook, y’all,
we got enough baking soda in my basement to open up
ten bakeries! The cakes they sell so fast I never see
them—just the customers at the screen door lookin’
some kind of hungry

A series of poems riff on “haint blue,” a shade of paint traditionally used on porch ceilings in Georgia and South Carolina to ward off evil spirits. Used widely by Gullah peoples, the paint is derived from indigo, a cash crop that was central to the transatlantic slave trade. Freeman invokes this complicated history as she meditates on the legacies we inherit:

I am the third girl of a third girl of a third girl of old blood in a new body. I am a Freeman. I am love & craft & country. I got some steady eyes in the back of my hope. Some spells
just take centuries & so much blood to complete. 

The poem “Haint Green” begins: “A funny thing happened at my father’s funeral. His friend owed him money & he put it in the coffin with him.” And in “Haint Glitter” the speaker asks: “Do you know how / hard it is for a ghost to protect a girl?”

It’s like grasping glitter with an invisible pair
of tweezers. The ghost, the father, he is neither
here nor there & the girl, she is both. 

In this balance between life and death, between myth and urban lit, Freeman’s lyrics cry out, wail, keen, and reward.