American Sycamore is an exploration of racial identity and the natural world, rooted in the mythopoetics of wilderness and ancestry as sources of trauma, grief, wonder, and tremendous resource. In pursuit of understanding the nuances of belonging and displacement in a Black mixed-race feminine body, Lisbeth White travels through mythic, biological, and geological landscapes, attending to the body and its beautiful and terrifying questions. Her journey manifests in a poetic helix of recurring bridges, trees, myths, origins, and awakenings. From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, these poems traverse global terrain while interrogating the dark past/present of America. In American Sycamore, the poet examines the Black diaspora, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine, inviting the reader into a deep conversation of seeking and recovery.
They think I am Dutch here: another caramel-something picturesque
in this Netherlands city park amidst the weaving bicycles and willows
weeping over the duck pond.
Because eventually diaspora relocates origin? Because mixed ancestry
mixes it up everywhere? I am addressed in Dutch as much as in
English. In French. In Spanish. No one can guess how to speak to me.
If I could speak all the languages, still I would always be most afraid
I would never be able to say how it is the world moves through me. I
learn to copy the voices of others and live within their masks.
The truth is I’m nostalgic for a beingness unmarkable. A bodyscape
un-delineated. A landscape unmapped. Unmappable. Recognized
simply, by tree, by evening light, by direction of wind in grasses.
A landscape intimate with secret monikers, known only by the one
who utters the calling. Precious as it sounds when I cup my palm
before my mouth, when I speak into my hands my own name.
Listen to “Swamp Cypress,” read by Lisbeth White:
Listen to “Origin of Air,” read by Lisbeth White:
Finalist for the 2023 First Horizon Book Award, Shortlist for 2023 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize, and received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry