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I Wore My Blackest Hair
I Wore My Blackest Hair | Carlina Duan
4 posts | 2 read | 13 to read
Celebrating Chinese American girlhood in all its confusion, love, and loss. In I Wore My Blackest Hair, Fulbright grant and Edna Meudt Memorial Award recipient Carlina Duan delivers an electric debut collection of poetry. With defiance and wild joy, Duan's poems wrestle with and celebrate ancestry and history, racial consciousness, and the growing pains of girlhood. They explore difficult truths with grace and power. I Wore My Blackest Hair is an honest portrait of a woman in-between--identities, places, languages, and desires--and her quest to belong. The speaker is specific in her self-definition, discovering and reinventing what it means to be a bold woman, what it means to be Chinese American, and what it means to grow into adulthood. Duan moves seamlessly from the personal to the imaginative to the universal, heralding a brilliant new voice in contemporary poetry.
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queerbookreader
Pickpick

Amazing. Fierce. Some serious power stands behind the author's words. The emotion feels raw. Outstanding poetry collection about Chinese American girlhood.

38 likes1 stack add
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queerbookreader
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Off to therapy ?

In the continuing saga of "Claire is incapable of using a real bookmark and instead uses any random scrap of paper they can find", an expired parking pass is my bookmark for today. That's a step up from a tissue like I had to use last week, tho ?

julesG I have a jar full of bookmarks, but what do I use? Exactly, anything but the bookmarks. 5y
Soubhiville I‘m very intrigued by this title... 5y
queerbookreader @Soubhiville From the inside flap, "celebrating Chinese American girlhood in all its confusion, love, and loss" 5y
PerksOfBeingABookworm I recently reread a book and found an old admission ticket to the St. Louis Arch. I‘m pretty sure it was a leftover random “bookmark” that I never threw away. 5y
36 likes1 stack add4 comments
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Moray_Reads
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#BlackIsTheColor of Carlina Duan's hair and a link to the Chinese heritage she tries to reconcile with her American life
#NoFemmeBer @Cinfhen @Billypar

Cinfhen Sounds good 👍🏻thanks for sharing 😊 5y
Billypar I love the title- that bodes well for poetry volumes in particular. 5y
56 likes3 stack adds2 comments
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Kristy_K
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Pickpick

A few of my favorite lines:

"My mother is not from your country,
and I am not ashamed."

"I am lonely, in my lonely chest."

"To replace the languages our mom spoke, we smoked up our Chinese with blond dolls, our new knees. American girls."

"I was her American daughter, my tongue my hardest muscle forced to swallow a muddy alphabet."

"The truth is/ I want to leave but I don't want to leave & I know nothing/ & everything..."

⭐️⭐️⭐️?

#poetry

67 likes6 stack adds