M. Nzadi Keita presents Migration Letters, her new collection of poems drawn from her experiences of being born in Philadelphia into a Black family and a Black culture transported from the American South by the Great Migration. These poems reflect on intimate aspects of Black history, culture, and identity, revealing an uncommon perspective on working-class Philadelphia from the 1960s to the present day — including the author's life in West Mt. Airy. To reserve your copy for signing, please use the Add to Cart button on this page.
In 55 poems, Migration Letters straddles the personal and public with particular, photorealistic detail to identify what, over time, creating a home creates in ourselves. M. Nzadi Keita’s poetry sparks a profoundly hybrid gaze of the visual and the sensory. Her lyrical fragments and sustained narrative plunge into the unsung aspects of Black culture and explore how Black Americans journey toward joy.
Propelled by the conditions that motivated her family’s migration north, the poems pull heavily from Keita’s place in her family, communities, and the world at large. They testify to her time and circumstances growing up Black in Philadelphia on the periphery of the civil rights and Black Power movements. Each poem builds upon an inheritance of voices: a panoramic perspective of an Easter Sunday service in a Black church gives way to an account of psychic violence in a newly integrated school; the collective voices of a beauty salon’s patrons fragment into memories of neighborhoods in North Philadelphia that have faded over time.
Migration Letters strives to tell a story about Black people that radiates across generations and testifies to a world that, as Lucille Clifton wrote, “has tried to kill [us] and has failed.” They interrogate how one’s present begins in the past, what we gain from barriers and boundaries, and what notions of progress energize our journey forward. Keita’s poems intimately reveal how Black culture can be inherited and built upon complex relationships where love and pain are inextricably linked.
Nzadi will be joined by poet, photographer, and journalist Pheralyn Dove. As well as an author and visual artist, Pheralyn is a hopelessly optimistic romantic (and former Mt. Airy resident). A graduate of Hampton University, Pheralyn’s spirations are guided by Spirit. Her intellectual and creative work are informed by The Struggle for the Liberation of all African People throughout The Diaspora, Cultural Preservation, and Emotional Healing.