New Chapbook: Three Harriets and Others

The Three Harriets and Others by Glenis Redmond

$14.99

 

Redmond has shifted herself in powerful persona for The Three Harriets & Others. Each voice is urgent and determined to survive, to find ways “to worship and swim” out of the spirit-crushing compromises forced upon slaves in the early centuries of America. Most notable are the Harriets—artistry and ingenuity meet desperation as each shape shifts to make it to freedom. We encounter a Tubman who seems to be delivering instruction for how to change ourselves into the night as she slips “into owl or hawk. Turn tree trunk. Become de hound chasing” on the underground railroad. Redmond presents survival as transformation in these powerful portraits. The need for this book is unmistakable, as Redmond drops us right through the “blue black” heart of escape.

–Amber Flora Thomas, author of Eye of Water: Poems

 

The Three Harriets & Others reimagine the agency and ancestral urgency of Black foremothers. Glenis Redmond raises her/their voices with fierce unflinching and unapologetic poetics. These poems offer an ancient, unshackled breath that allows them to “Spill ink like night clouds that clot what your soul cannot hold.”

–Jaki Shelton Green, NC Poet Laureate

 

The words of the Harriets and Others created by Glenis Redmond, provide readers with a powerful insight into the life and times of three resilient African American Women.

–Dr. Lynnette Overby, University of Delaware

 

Redmond’s The Three Harriets and Others  elevates the conductor of the Underground Railroad, the first published Black novelist, and a young woman known for her haunting slave narrative in North Carolina. Glenis is a South Carolina poet, and a quilter. These poems quench the thirst for the stories that should be essential as water.”

–Dr. Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit

The Three Harriets and Others