Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

Poetry. African American Studies. These poems speak to us with voices borrowed from the pages of novels of Alice Walker, Jean Toomer, and Toni Morrison—voices that still have more to say, things to discuss. Each struggles beneath a yoke of dreaming, loving, and suffering. These characters converse not just with the reader but also with each other, talking amongst themselves, offering up their secrets and hard-won words of wisdom, an everlasting conversation through which these poems voice a shared human experience.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, writer, painter and photographer. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and others. Her literary and visual work has appeared in Callaloo, The New York Times, Crab Orchard Review, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Poetry, and many others. Griffiths is the author of two books, MULE and PEAR (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2011) and MIRACLE ARRHYTHMIA (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2010), and two chapbooks, Turn of Heaven (Paris Boulevard Press, 2009) and According to Beauty (Paris Boulevard Press, 2010). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York.