The shoes of the fisherman's wife are coated with Kentucky dust and soil. They travel across oceans to ask questions of Egypt's deities, of Mali's Mansa Musa, of Nigeria's musician-activist Fela Kuti. In sonically rich, surrealist poems with nature at their heart and a touch of absurdism, upfromsumdirt creates an experience on the page that is of our moment and beyond it.
Simultaneously mythic and realist, this collection is an invitation to sway in a swell of Black love and to stomp in protest against the world's injustices. The voice in these poems is both intimate and international, welcoming us into his soul and taking us on a sweeping journey through the Black diaspora. In the process, upfromsumdirt demonstrates the complexity of Blackness by examining the portal of his own body through space and time and interrogating its binds.
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife is a place to linger and wonder, to mourn and laugh, and to bear witness to the living and the dead.
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife: Poems, by upfromsumdirt
upfromsumdirt, aka Ronald W. Davis, is an autodidactic poet, visual artist, and designer from Louisville, Kentucky. He is the illustrator of A Is for Affrilachia and the NAACP Image Award–winning Perfect Black. He is the author of many chapbooks and the full-length collections The Second Stop Is Jupiter: Poems, To Emit Teal, and Deifying a Total Darkness.
