mourning my inner blackgirl child

mourning my inner[blackgirl]child is an unabashed exposure of girlhood fragility, ancestral grieving, and embodied remembering. In her excavation of multiple pasts and multiple selves, reelaviolette botts-ward journeys through intimate encounters with her mother(s), her home, her body, and her precarity. As she mourns her deepest wounds, reelaviolette lays bare the im/possibilities of Black girlhood, slippages of Black motherhood, and matrilineal legacies of abuse. In telling her story, she tells so many of our own. reelaviolette’ s poetry invites Black women deeper into our healing and centers the little girl within herself who has a sacred word for the world.
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In a world that marginalizes, castigates, and abuses Black women, reelaviolette botts-ward loves us. She loves us as she exposes the raw truth of those external pressures on our bodies, minds, and spirits. She loves us defiantly and brilliantly, treats us with care and attention, as she crafts a poetics infused praxis of resilience and regeneration. In this book, she fearlessly reveals her personal harm and invites us to develop an empathetic depth needed for collective change. Hers is a praxis of self-healing and freedom, and she generously holds out a hand to guide us all, too. Healing is messy and the practice of healing is hard; still, she pulls us along, persistently. She breaks through tangles and reveals the spikes that threaten within narrative, deftly composed poetic form, and an interweaving of spell-inducing metaphor. Particularly in the integration of poems written in her teenage years, reelaviolette shows us a clarity in her wisdom and healing. She loves us Black women and that is the greatest testament to her daring in this important work, for love is the foundation of any movement that truly shapes the world and the people within it anew. – Raina Leó n