“A health care system built on bias and inequity, a system of policing that snatches our sons & daughters from our arms, and a pandemic painting a target on our backs – this is 2020 through the eyes of a black woman with chronic illness.
If you’ve ever been dismissed, ignored, suspected, or accused by a healthcare provider, you will relate to these verses.”
In this “Corona-cation”-created collection, Maria James-Thiaw delivers personal poetic reflections on chronic illness and mortality, race relations, and family history. The speaker’s experiences form a colored chronicle of “Despair-ities” as fluidly surreal as Dali’s melting clocks, in which she “folds up her somedays” in response to an immune system that “unpeels her like fresh fruit,” yet conjures music even from suffering (“My sister’s cells sickle”). Her pain-pricked body is a voodoo doll. Even a right-wing white supremacist becomes a left-handed kindred soul whose “nerves burn like crosses on each vertebra.” Count Each Breath scrapes the poem-bone raw. Its verses burn with rage, against an uncertain future, an unredeemed past, and a bruised and bruising, black and blue-and white-America.
– Vernita Hall, author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color
Maria James-Thiaw published her third book of poetry, Count Each Breath, this September through Wild Ink Publishing. You can find Count Each Breath here.
This May, Maria’s choreopoem, Hair Story, will hit the stage in Harrisburg, PA. You can find out more on the Reclaim Artist Collective website.
HairStory follows the journey of a young ambitious Black woman, Aleyah, who is working all the angles to make a name for herself as a hard-hitting journalist. Imagine her surprise when her editor assigns her a “fluff” story about Black-owned beauty salons. Her journey takes her back to ancient stories and rituals woven into African people. Aleyah encounters many deep-rooted stories of how Black and Brown people have been ostracized and objectified for their hair. She is pulled into memories of sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and aunties who lovingly and sternly braided traditions, demands, and power into each other’s hair. Will Aleyah see herself in these stories or will she refuse to look in the mirror?
What inspired you to start writing?
I was surrounded by readers and writers. My dad was a poet and would read his work aloud. I knew as a toddler that when I learned to write, I would write poems.
What inspired you to write this Count Each Breath?
Count Each Breath was inspired by the realization that my story was not just my own. Women and people of color face racial bias in healthcare and that can lead to negative health outcomes, lower quality of life or even death. It is wrong. I saw what was happening in 2020 and I felt so vulnerable as a woman of color with chronic health problems. I knew I had to document this strange time we were living through. And they wonder why black people rose up in 2020. And it wasn’t only us. A whole host of people of all colors rose with us. There were people marching for black lives in small towns that had zero black residents. This was revolutionary. I had to document the moment with poetry.
What is one thing you really want readers to know about your book?
I think even though it deals with an issue that is specific to people of color, women of any race are also marginalized by the healthcare industry and they can relate to this poetry as well. It takes four or more years to get an accurate diagnosis of an autoimmune disease, in med schools the male body is often studied while women bodies are not. We aren’t just little men with boobs! (LOL) We are often dismissed as emotional when we know our bodies and we know something is going on. We have to advocate for ourselves.
Can you tell me a bit about your writing habit or the process you took in writing this book?
When the shutdown first happened I couldn’t create. I was extremely anxious and trying to self medicate that…I mean, my husband was trapped behind closed borders and couldn’t get home for nearly 6 months and my kids have special needs. It was really difficult. But eventually I started watching documentaries – Margaret Attwood was a really important one – they started unlocking my “poem bone” as I say in the book. I started attending online poetry gatherings and that helped. Eventually I was writing nearly every day in between Cuomo’s press conference
and the Trump Show. (Was it a comedy show, or a horror show? Definitely the Twilight Zone) All of that was inspiration. Readers will see when they read “The First Fourteen” about the first two weeks of the pandemic.
What piece of advice would you give aspiring authors?
Hone your craft. Be open to criticism. Read other poets so you know what is out there. Stretch the limits of what you are doing now. When you see what a Patricia Smith, or Jericho Brown, or Ross Gaye can do, then you will know that you can do more as well. Take risks, be inventive, and never stop growing.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
My poetry always leans toward social justice. I’m a daughter of Civil Rights Activists and I believe that poetry is my sword in the fight against ignorance, racism, and inequality. They’ll see that in my choreopoems as well.
Wild Ink Publishing 