Nzadi Keita’s poems about a “first gen North-born” Black woman

During the Great Migration, from 1916 to 1970, millions of poor Black people left the South for a better life in the North. Philadelphia, for example, saw a 500 percent increase in its Black population in these years. But unlike other migrant groups, Black Americans did not assimilate and were victimized by prevailing racism. These historical truths energize Nzadi Keita’s stunning new collection of poems about a “first gen North-born” young woman raised in a working-class Black family in Philadelphia in the time of civil rights and the Black Power movement. Though she was born in Philly, the South still stayed with her, “another country you cannot see / a country you recognize by smell and inflection” as it did for some Black people who “will always wake up inside” a “Southern country.” It was a “South of troubled sleep left on pillows by instinct.”

But Keita’s poems are much more than geographic landmarks; they are memoirs of the “inside self” and “severed dreams” of a young Black woman and her generation struggling to claim their identity:

what if I see myself
scrap iron waiting for a red light