Birthing Butterflies by Claudia May

$25.99

 

Birthing Butterflies is an awakening, a call to luxuriate in the rhythms of language, revel in the sensory body, and then bear witness as that body which loves is subjected to brutalities born from indifference and hate.  This book, born from the spirit and wings of generations of Black women, is gifted with flight.

–Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life

 

Damn, this book of poems is gonna live on my bed nightstand… because “sometimes courage needs company.” Bejeweled. Keenly attuned. Unbounded. Claudia May alchemized liberation in my soul. I fumble finding words worthy to describe the gettin’ free I felt while reading this marvelous work of creation. It’s like the verses jumped on my back and grew wings that want to take flight! Claudia May dropped potent medicine here. Like a good midwife, she took me through some serious rebirths. How does she do that?

–Julia Dinsmore, author of My Name Is Child of God . . . Not “Those People”: A First Person Look at Poverty 

 

In Birthing Butterflies, Claudia May brings her expertise and empathy as a scholar and educator, to create poetry that embodies ancestral notes of birthing, survival, trauma and ultimate triumph.  In crafting this “poetic memorial” to Black motherhood, midwifery, and survival of the trauma inflicted by medical modernity, May uses the butterfly as metaphor and inspiration of rebirth and resurrection.  These poems cut deep and echo the strong tradition of Black poets such as Phillis Wheatley, Frances E.W. Harper, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and Lucille Clifton. They draw, as well, on the vernacular tradition of the oral testimony of formerly enslaved Americans in the WPA narratives, giving voice to pain, loss and healing journeys that have been silenced for far too long.

–Katherine Clay Bassard, author of Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible

 

Claudia May turns the unspoken, the unknown, the forgotten, into poetry. In Birthing Butterflies, the enslaved women who suffered under the knife of J. Marion Sims are whole again. Here, they are mothers and daughters, they love, they sing the Blues, they pray, they cry, they are. May’s words give us the language for our collective historic grief. What a gift.

–Kelly Elaine Navies, oral historian, writer, poet, and contributor to Affrilachia: Testimonies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Description

Birthing Butterflies

by Claudia May

Full-length, Paper

$23.99 List: $25.99

979-8-88838-794-8

2024

Pre-order Price Guarantee until September 20, 2024

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This title will be released on November 15, 2024

Birthing Butterflies aligns the metamorphosis of butterflies, a symbol of transformation and resurrection, with nineteenth-century Black enslaved mothers. Like a cocoon, their wombs nurtured and birthed memories that sustained Black life. Just as butterflies take flight from the confines of their self-built shells, these poems explore how Black enslaved mothers inhabited Black love, joy, agony, freedom, and rebirth. They soared above the systemic structures of slavery set on diminishing their human dignity and dismantling their communal regard.

Birthing Butterflies acknowledges the suffering Black enslaved mothers experienced when their difficult labors left them unable to control their bladder and bowel movements — a condition called obstetric fistula. These women endured countless surgeries without the aid of anesthesia when the nineteenth-century surgeon, J. Marion Sims, operated on their tender bodies.

Birthing Butterflies recognizes the collective trauma shadowing the histories of Black enslaved mothers. Still, this collection of poems decenters Sims’ presence by asking, what role did enslaved community members play in caring for Black women burdened with the infirmity of obstetric fistula? Who nursed these women as distress overcame their bodies and spirits? What hopes did they have for their children?

Birthing Butterflies offers a humane appreciation of the vital spirit and robust legacy of Black enslaved women. Imbued with beauty and the paradoxical fullness of human complexity, their trauma stories are as restorative as they are harrowing, healing, and liberating. Set amidst a violent socio-economic and predatory slave system, this collection of poems begins with Black love. Black enslaved people upheld each other’s priceless and treasured dignity. They affirmed what James Baldwin would later come to assert, that “a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit.”[1] Black (un)enslaved mothers embodied the vulnerability, fight, and emotional transparency of the blues. They invoked the agency of the spirituals that dwells in the depths of African diasporic cosmologies. Their speech and wisdoms relished the linguistic ingenuity of Black English and reveled in the dialectal flair of creole. Their nursery rhymes and lullabies were relatives to the dissonant timbres of Jazz and the exultations of lament. As memory keepers, their testimonies sang griot chronicles. In Birthing Butterflies, Black enslaved women become a sacred harbor as they abide in processes of luscious becoming for themselves and generations to come.

[1] Baldwin, James. “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis.” The New York Review of Books, 19 Nov. 1970, www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/07/an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis/.

Claudia May is a poet, an award-winning children’s book author, a storyteller, scholar, Hedgebrook alum, and nature lover.

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