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Book

What had happened was

Call Number

  • 811 P5949 (CEN)

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Publication Information

Durham : Duke University Press, 2025.

Physical Description

83 pages ; 27 cm

Summary

"What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens's debut poetry collection, investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Exploring topics that range from Black life, popular culture, and history, to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens's poetry blends theory with autobiography. Pickens writes in conversation with various influences, tying her own experiences and scholarly research to cultural touchpoints throughout time, including Harriet Tubman, The Fresh Prince, and Mary J. Blige"--

Contents

  • This. On This Day
  • The Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death
  • On March 12, 2020, Breonna Taylor
  • On Losing; A Hypothesis
  • Customary Calculus for Chronicity
  • Getting Dressed
  • Depression, Jacob Lawrence, 1950
  • If Lyndon B. Johnson hadn't had his heart attack
  • Remember the episode of Bones when
  • Ode to Checking My Shit
  • Anatomy of Soap
  • my lover says (my mind)
  • I found out I have something
  • Ursa Corregidora and Mary J. Blige Contemplate Life Without Children
  • That. Dispatches from the Pediatric Ward
  • Collar is What Hangs Around the Neck
  • I am watching a documentary about food, again
  • Corona Poem
  • T
  • On sex
  • Palimpsestina
  • The Amateur Gardener Contemplates Trauma
  • Apostrophe to Inspiration
  • Chronically Ill
  • On recompense
  • I tell her some of her ancestors must have snitched on Harriet Tubman
  • What You Don't See When Ben Vereen Guest Stars as Will's Father on The Fresh Prince, May 1994
  • Mind You. What Had Happened Was
  • & The Third. Variation on a Theme
  • Potential Ode or Elegy Out My Window
  • Neighborhood Watch
  • Coming Home
  • Ranunculus
  • It was just before Thanksgiving
  • June, 2018
  • Ursa Corregidora Goes to Junior High in the 1990s
  • Some Suicides are Slow
  • I got into a Twitter beef with Lolo Jones over a blind white girl
  • What Cliff Should Have Told Theo on the Pilot of The Cosby Show, September 1984
  • Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Simon Godwin, National Theatre, 2019
  • my lover says (he doesn't remember)
  • I meet a man with a stutter.

Subjects

Genres

Poetry.

Added Authors

Therí A Pickens