Yolanda Wisher
Poet Yolanda Wisher was born in Philadelphia and raised in North Wales, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA at Lafayette College and an MA at Temple University and was a Cave Canem fellow. She is the author of the poetry collection Monk Eats an Afro (2014). Her work has been included in the anthologies Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (2006), The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years (2009). Wisher’s poems are musical, playful, and brutal, and she infuses spoken language with blues-informed cadence to engage themes of intimacy, power, and identity. Source
no more grandma poems
they said
forget your grandma
these american letters
don’t need no more
grandma poems
but i said
the grandmas are
our first poetic forms
the first haiku
was a grandma
& so too
the first sonnet
the first blues
the first praise song
therefore
every poem
is a grandmother
a womb that has ended
& is still expanding
a daughter that is
rhetorically aging
& retroactively living
every poem
is your grandma
& you miss her
wouldn’t mind
seeing her again
even just
for a moment
in the realm of spirit
in the realm
of possibilities
where poems
share blood
& spit & exist
on chromosomal
planes of particularity
where poems
are strangers
turned sistren
not easily shook
or forgotten
Published:
2021
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2023
Themes:
Ars Poetica
Family
Memory & The Past
Literary Devices:
Dialogue
conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Repetition
a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times