Sometimes you have to reach far and wide to get at the
truth. The reaching is the “birthing [of a] new alphabet for desire.” Shanta
Lee Gander is in search of that new language, an unbroken path to the truth.
Inspired by Ovid, her Black Metamorphoses fuses new poetry
with old forms to make things right through needful change. The travesty of
slavery and the discovery of hope “bring us nectar that bathes wounds.” Read
this book and be dazzled into a new way of seeing.
—Pablo Medina,
Starting before Eve, Shanta Lee
Gander’s collection, Black Metamorphoses,
begins with an earnest desire to know what will be buried in us, in our blood.
What is left in the wake of our hunger? What myths travel the wind, expand,
implode, pull us in? Gander sees gods reincarnate everywhere and paints them
anew, haints in the garden, in the copper, in a leather purse, even “These
fingernails filled with Black body” are illumined herein. Black Metamorphoses posits that Black folks are nearly invincible,
eternal. Despite what we carry and how far, we’ll keep on living.
—Remica
Bingham-Risher, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me
Up
I
hesitate to call any work of contemporary poetry an epic but no other word will describe Shanta Lee Gander’s Black
Metamorphoses. Gander is an audacious mythmaker, inspired by Ovid
but also keen to debunk the Eurocentric patriarchy that he represents. In a
series of wildly ambitious and formally inventive monologues and character
studies, Gander offers a searing threnody for the victims of slavery and the
African Diaspora. Yet the book is also a moving and hard-won celebration of the
black body: the rituals of mourning give way to empowerment. As she writes in
one poem, “It be
both crown and burden,/ glory of yours and grievance of othas/ Be not touched
by jus any hands,/ it be bridge to your making or the road to a bound soul.” Black Metamorphoses is a stunning accomplishment.
—David Wojahn,
