Cover Art: Tamara Natalie Madden
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Paperback, 60 pages
June 15 2018, ISBN 978-1-936919-51-2
about Sons of Achilles
Sons of Achilles questions what it means to be in and of a lineage of violence when every interaction one has with violence and intimacy, fictional and/or real, feed into relationships with self and others. How does a black woman parse, navigate, and unlearn the ways violence and intimacy intertwine when the trauma from it is familial, cultural, and even state sanctioned? From mythical characters that depict and pass down a progeny of violence through their canonization, to the witnessing of violence, this collection questions the ways violence enters and inhabits a life.
about Nabila Lovelace
Nabila Lovelace is a born and raised Queens native, as well as a first generation American. Her parents hail from Trinidad and Tobago and Nigeria. She currently resides in Tuscaloosa, AL. Her first collection, Sons of Achilles, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2018. Nabila is a 2016 Poetry Witch Magazine Summer Solstice Bop Contest finalist, a 2016 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest finalist, 2015 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow, finalist for the Emerge-Be-Surface fellowship 2014, and a winner of the 2013 Poets & Writers Amy Award. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Narrative Northeast, Washington Square Review, Day One, Winter Tangerine: Hands Up Don't Shoot, ESPN, & Vinyl. She is co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival. Her editorial work includes screening for Callaloo Journal, assistant poetry editor at Black Warrior Review, & co-poetry editor for The Offing.
Sons of Achilles by Nabila Lovelace (Digital)
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Veterans Memorial Drive
I am not a woman
excited by war
relics, though
I am considering
buying a gun. The kind
lean as tenderloin, but still
burst the fire through. I mean,
I am a small girl
in her lonesome. No
guarenteed safety
of my niga at night. No,
just me, and my sharpest knife
smoking an L
near the window sill;
there is an entire boulevard
for a veterans memory
in Tuscaloosa.
Collective memory
is a hell of a snag.
My memory
is a long Uhaul
down Memorial Drive
disobeying traffic
I am the largest
on this paved liquer,
and even the smallest
child burnt does not
stop the maniacal laugh.
I wonder if this is history
when visting a country
that has bombed you out
the wazoo. My God. Where
am I with my 12 guage shotty? Who
am I but afraid
living in a country
that celebrates
a machine that kills
thousands of children
and also prints
God Bless America
on its license plates,
will garner me
the worst kind
of karma.
