The Shared World

“I knew early on I could be blown to bits by any / White man with enough rage.” At the core of Vievee Francis’s The Shared World stands the agonizing “On the Piney Woods, Death, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Me,” which merges the speaker’s foundational memories of her dead mother with the chilling discovery that Cherry, a white supremacist who murdered four Black girls in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, lived near the speaker after committing the crime:

They died as I was born. They were blown
to the winds. I was born into the storm of them.
I cannot hold it all together. The pieces,
of them, of me. My mother hated my needing
to touch her. To have her in my sight.

The longing for love and protection in a world that denies it permeates this collection, surfacing again in “My Dolls Were Just That,” which reflects on a child mothering eight white dolls who she loves and cares for “as if they could ward off whatever / came for me. And when it did, / they were nowhere to be found.”

The reckonings in these poems are bodily. In Ghana, the adult speaker finds a doll who is “a smaller version of myself” and instinctively cradles her: “She was hard but could be broken. I am / only as hard as I need to be and have been / broken many times.” The poem “Returns” traces a painful journey back to the South, where

I could not find the battle-
field. And the field my mother would have
worked as a child was a parking lot. And I sat
between the lines and cried for what
I would never have, justice.
And the tanks within me rusted, and
the bombs imploded in what was left.

Amid the cruelties they expose, these poems embody the “tender after terror” of “1965,” a poem responding to the photograph of activist Harriet Michel caring for bloodied poet Galway Kinnell at the Selma to Montgomery march. The beauty of this collection fully erupts in “Break Me and I’ll Sing”:

I’m singing now, louder this time and in the round:
We are a-wounding of red-plumed birds. Every voice,
a bloody feather in the bone crown.