I Have a Teacher

“This intense, remarkable, searing sequence takes, in seventeen steps, a journey to that place where the ancient reciprocity between the living and the dead (all but forgotten in a world of end-stopped sentences) is fully realized by a fragile mourner–along the way she becomes a poet of steel and pure spirit. Both brave and vulnerable, the poem is not an elegy for the loss of a friend, but a continuous movement from silence to singing, a movement that seeks, learns, and celebrates the edgelessness of all life. A friend has died, yes, but, as we learn in the preface, the teacher has died since; yet this poem is not entitled “I Had a Teacher” but “I Have a Teacher”; this in itself reveals the evaporating edge that not only removes all “punctuation”–beginnings, ends–from the poem, but removes as well all doubt. Such faith is rare, and beautiful, and abiding, as is the poem, this song sprung from a shell.”  –Mary Ruefle

This beautiful chapbook was printed on the occasion of the author’s reading at Center for Book Arts in 2016. It was selected by Mary Ruefle as the winning manuscript of the CBA chapbook contest that year. Letterpress printed on wood veneer and Canaletto paper at Swamp Press. Hand bound in an edition of 100. Linoleum blocks cut by Barbara Henry.

Contents

• Preface
• Ghana – One
• America – Two
• Winneba – Three
• Winneba – Four
• Accra – Five
• Accra – Six
• Cape Coast – Seven
• Accra – Eight
• Winneba – Nine
• Cape Coast – Ten
• Eweland – Eleven
• Junctin – Twelve
• Accra – Thirteen
• Accra – Fourteen
• Winneba – Fifteen
• Accra – Sixteen
• Pittsburgh – Seventeen
• Notes