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Reviews
- PageTurners: How Trauma and Love Converge at a Literary Point – The Root
- Review of Ghost In A Black Girl’s Throat – Entropy Mag
- Khalisa Rae’s Superpower – Artlitlab
- Exorcising Whiteness: Khalisa Rae’s Ghost In A Black Girl’s Throat – The Rumpus
- Review – Publisher’s Weekly
- Khalisa Rae’s Collection “Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat” Summons Ghosts of Ancestral Pain – Charlotte Readers Podcast
- [REVIEW] Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat by Khalisa Rae – PANK
- Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat reviews on Book Marks
- 3 Poetry Books on Infusing Experience With Personal Mythology – Yes Poetry
- Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat Calls For Women To Speak Their Truth – The Culture Commentator
- Khalisa Rae: “Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat” Review and Interview (Poetry) – Oyster River Pages
Ghost In A Black Girl's Throat
What happens when a Midwestern girl migrates to a haunted Southern town, whose river is a graveyard, whose streets bear the names of Southern slave owners? How can she build a home where Confederate symbols strategically stand in the center of town? Can she sage the chilling truths of her ancestors? What will she do to cope with the traumatizing ghostliness of the present-day South?
Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is a heart-wrenching reconciliation and confrontation of the living, breathing ghosts that awaken Black women each day. This debut poetry collection summons multiple hauntings—ghosts of matriarchs that came before, those that were slain, and those that continue to speak to us, but also those horrors women of color strive to put to rest. Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat examines the haunting feeling of facing past demons while grappling with sexism, racism, and bigotry. They are all present: ancestral ghosts, societal ghosts, and spiritual, internal hauntings. This book calls out for women to speak their truth in hopes of settling the ghosts or at least being at peace with them.
Praise
“If storytelling in the griot’s hand is a form or resistance, then GHOST IN A BLACK GIRL’S THROAT is a form of control. Khalisa Rae’s poetics are unbreakable glass knives that own charted and unmarked underground burrows, providing refuge for righteous indignation. Unapologetic, slippery, but cautious language weaves inside, over and under the remnants of sacrifice and atonement. We recoil to remember that our ancestral mothers once had a voice and now our voices are our bodies.” —Jaki Shelton Green, author of I Want to Undie You
“Khalisa Rae’s Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is like a newborn scream that’s been held in for eons. Sharp, strong, unapologetic, beautiful, and angry, the writing in this collection is a celebration of language and rhythm…. The result is a book that demands to be read with clenched fists and an open heart.” —PANK
“Rae considers the intersection of history and modernity in the American South in her provocative debut.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“A remarkable chronicle of agency and prophetic voice. Ghosts and apparitions are among playful agents in the pages to witness a reclamation and provide a powerful fire. This haunting is but a reckoning of reconciliations and a quest for meaning in agency against oppressive forces.” —Yes Poetry
“Our hauntings, our ghosts, our pain–the deepest of hues, heavy and harrowing–live as we do in the here and now, awaiting rest. Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat honors the dead as the living, speaking new life into all that weighs on black women–by freeing the voices of those who have been silenced, bringing peace to the restless who are powerless no more.”
—Denise Nichole Andrews, Editor in Chief, The Hellebore Press, and Founder, HUES Foundation