Erika poetry madame noire blogo5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() She was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, and a recent recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, is a New York Times Bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. A poet, novelist, and essayist, her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She has recently been appointed the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at Erika L. ![]() Wed, at least once more, indulgence to the truth.Erika L. One needs to raise an eyebrow, show a thigh, This city of perpetual rains but, my love, But, to whet your curiosity, here’s the last part of the poem ‘Madame Noire Tours the City at Night’: ![]() It’s impossible to give a flavour of the book by quoting a few lines, because each character’s poems are completely different in style and mood and content. Is Madame Noire a parody of Mrs Thatcher? The play refers to the French Revolution, biblical passages, classical art and literature-is it an imagined war between religion and reality? I’ve read it many times, and I’m still no wiser. I would agree with Don Paterson about political articulation. The cast of the play include Madame Noire, H (who I took to be a Christ-like figure), The Uninformer (a poet) and R (with strong references to Casablanca’s Rick). There is humour in the writing it’s quick witted and clever, and I have the feeling that Armstrong had a good deal of fun writing it. Perhaps it’s me, but I found myself moving through the poems like I used to move through those pea-souper London fogs of the 1950s: that heady excitement of walking through a deceptively familiar landscape, combined with being totally and utterly lost. And head scratching was something I did a lot of as I read and re-read the verse play that is Madame Noire. The back has two quotes about Armstrong’s previous collections, one of which I think I understand “radiant and politically articulate meditations” (Don Paterson) but the other is a Peter Porter soundbite that leaves me scratching my head: “the language is made into a real sculpture: this truly is authority at its least questionable”. His latest offering: Madame Noire (subtitled and other figures at the edge of an imagined war ) is another high quality production from John Lucas’s excellent Shoestring Press- beautifully bound, with an elegant mottled grey cover. Peter Armstrong is a co-editor of Other Poetry, and has collections published by Enitharmon and Picador and poems in Poetry Review.
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