In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.
- Cover
- 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 Floor
- 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
- & 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
- Let Me Holla at You Right Quick; or Notes
- I Ain’t Forget about Y’all; or Acknowledgments
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