Promise: A Novel

Two Black sisters growing up in small-town New England fight to protect their home, their bodies, and their dreams as the Civil Rights Movement sweeps the nation in this "magical, magnificent novel" (Marlon James)&nbsp;from "a startlingly fresh voice" (Jacqueline Woodson). The people of Salt Point could indeed be fearful about the world beyond themselves; most of them would be born and die without ever having gone more than twenty or thirty miles from houses that were crammed with generations of their families. . . . But something was shifting at the end of summer 1957. The Kindred sisters--Ezra and Cinthy--have grown up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbors, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town, whose home is filled with spice-rubbed ribs and ground-shaking hugs. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful Maine village perched high up on coastal bluffs. But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbors, including Ezra's best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way. And as the news from distant parts of the country fills with calls for freedom, equality, and justice for Black Americans, the white villagers of Salt Point begin to view the Kindreds and the Junketts as threats to their way of life. Amid escalating violence, prejudice, and fear, bold Ezra and watchful Cinthy must reach deep inside the wells of love they've built to commit great acts of heroism and grace on the path to survival. In luminous, richly descriptive writing, Promise celebrates one family's story of resistance. It's a book that will break your heart--and then rebuild it with courage, hope, and love.

Literature & Fiction

Griffiths, Rachel Eliza

United States

Random House]

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Poetry. African American Studies. "For some years now, I have believed that Rachel Eliza Griffiths would be known as one of the most exquisite, powerful, and heartbreaking poets of her generation. Gracious and precise in its craft, unusually expansive in its emotional range, her new collection, MIRACLE ARRHYTHMIA, is a simply stunning volume of poems. Rachel Eliza Griffiths writes a poetry of perfected clarity and profound courage. She is a poet we will be looking to--for the consolation and wisdom of her work--for many more years to come"--David St. John.

Miracle Arrhythmia

Poetry

Aquarius Press/Willow Books

Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss.In radiant poems--set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics--Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother's death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss.A photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body's internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.

Seeing the Body: Poems

W.W.Norton&Company

Nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry\nAn elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness "bodies" of grief and healing. 
Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss. 
In radiant poems―set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics―Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss. 
A photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body’s internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love. 11 photographs

Promise

John Murray

New poems from poet, writer, photographer and painter Rachel Eliza Griffiths

The Requited Distance: Poems

Sheep Meadow Press

Lighting the Shadow is about a woman’s evolving journey through desire, grief, trauma, and the peculiar historical American psyche of desire and violence. These poems explore the international and psychological wars women survive―wars inflicted through various mediums that employ art, race, and literature. Furthermore, the collection is about a woman’s transformation and acceptance of her complicated attempts to balance her spirit’s own spectrum. Pulling the poet away from death, these poems insist that she open her life to her own powers and the powers of a greater world―a world that is both bright and dark.

Lighting the Shadow

Four Way Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Griffiths, Rachel Eliza. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Griffiths, Rachel Eliza

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Griffiths, Rachel Eliza. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Promise: A Novel

Promise: A Novel

Miracle Arrhythmia

Seeing the Body: Poems

Seeing the Body: Poems

Promise

The Requited Distance: Poems

Lighting the Shadow