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by Shanta Lee Gander (Author)
Black Metamorphoses, invites a reckoning of the past inviting readers to sift through known and unknown parts of history through verse, collective historical memory, and mythos of the forcibly traveled Black body.
Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2000+ year-old veil inspired by a range of Ovidian myths while resisting a direct conversion of the work. This collection explores the Black psyche, body, soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization. In a poetic range of forms, voices, and rhythms, the reader is bathed in ancestral memory, myth, and sense of the timeless of the shapeshifting, resilient Black body. This complete volume of work enters into another level of conversation with original interior illustrations created by visual artist Alan Blackwell. These illustrations create an additional kind of text and layer of mythos for the reader.Author Biography
Shanta Lee Gander is the author of Ghettoclaustrophobia: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, the winner of the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize with an honorable mention from the Sheila Margaret Motton prize, and reviews featured in the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books, Seven Days, and the Kenyon Review. Black Metamorphoses is Gander's second full length poetry collection inspired by her lifelong love of mythology, was shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson prize. When Gander is not writing poetry, she is working on her memoir project, doing arts and culture reviews for Vermont Public Radio, and tending to her photography projects. She has an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Trinity College, an M.B.A. from the University of Hartford, and her M.F.A. in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She teaches Media Studies at The Putney School and enjoys anything that allows her to explore beneath the surface (especially breaking into abandoned places). To see her visual art or read more of her work, visit: Shantaleegander.com.
