The Shared World: Poems

by Vievee Francis

The latest collection from award-winning poet Vievee Francis, The Shared World imagines the ideas and ideals and spaces of the Black woman. The book delves into inherited memories and restrictions between families, lovers, and strangers and the perception and inconvenient truth of Black woman as mother—with or without child. Francis challenges the ways in which Black women are often dismissed while expected to be nurturing. This raw assemblage of poetic narratives stares down the oppressors from within and writes a new language in the art of taking back the body and the memory. These poetic narratives are brutal in their lyrical blows but tender with the bruised history left behind. “You can’t stop this / song,” she writes. “More hands than yours have closed / around my throat.” Francis’s lyric gifts are on full display as she probes self-discovery, history, intimacy, and violence. Her voice encompasses humor and gravity, enigma and revelation. What emerges is a realm of intertwined experiences. “The secret to knowing the secret is to speak,” she concludes, “but we too often tell / the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does matter. / In truth, we are bound by one story, so you’d think by now / we’d tell it, at least to each other.”

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Hardcover

Published April 17, 2023

About the author

Vievee Francis is author of Horse in the Dark (2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She was the recipient of the 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is currently an associate editor for Callaloo.

Reviews

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vievee Francis can produce strong lines and phrases, but her poems too often succumb to complexity and ambition where accessibility becomes frustrating and meaning obscure. So many of these pieces started off with intrigue and promise only to drift into verbosity leaving me puzzled. In exploring and examining themes of oppression, memory, race, and womanhood, I like her purpose even though this collection became exhausting to focus on and complete. I wanted to like The Shared World, but none of the poems had me enamored enough to go back and revisit them. If you’re interested in poets more accessible with exposing and confronting injustice, racism, and oppression, try the brilliant Clint Smith and Joy Harjo. If you’re interested in poets more accessible with exploring and examining womanhood, try Sharon Olds, Sandra Cisneros, and Ada Limón. And if you’re interested in poets more accessible with probing the realms of memory, try Billy Collins and Naomi Shihab Nye (who Francis must admire because she chose lines from a Nye poem for her epigraph).

[Stephanie Dargusch Borders · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to connect with it more, but still a solid collection.

[David Sterritt]

Thanks to my son Craig for sending me Vievee Francis’s latest poetry collection, “The Shared World,” a striking blend of the lyrical, the reflective, the political, and the toughminded. The latter quality is what appeals to me most, along with the powerful imagery and unpredictable rhythms that keep the verse lively and surprising. Admirable reading.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second Vievee Francis collection (this is the newest, I believe). I liked the previous one more (Forest Primeval). This collection had a lot of poems where people are treating the speaker badly—and the ones where her mom treats her badly or her friends do, I found very hard to read. Sections II-IV seemed particularly bleak. Maybe it’s just not the right time for me to be reading these, maybe I’m just too sad to handle other people’s (legitimately earned) bitter anger. But also I couldn’t put off reading it because some other patron reserved it so the library wants it back!
.
I loved section I, however. Particularly loved “1965” (the poem that goes with the cover image of Galway Kinney and Harriet Richardson). Other faves: “The Poets Who Are Our Enemies,” “I’ve Been Thinking About Love Again.”

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
Those who live to have it and
those who live to give it.

Of course there are those for whom both are true,
but never in the same measure.

Those who have it to give are
like cardinals in the snow. So easy
and beautifully lit. Some
are rabbits. Hard to see
except for those who would prey upon them:
all that softness and quaking and blood.

Those who want it
cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and with such talons,
any furred thing will do. So easy
to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.

I wander out into the winter.
I know what I am. (45)

[Booked 📚 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 / 5

[Pamela J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful collection. Francis brings in the potency of the personal with her keen observer’s eye.

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Shared World Of Vievee Francis

The poet Vievee Francis was born to poverty in rural Texas. After many moves and life-experiences she earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan and has published four volumes of poetry which have received awards and praise. Francis is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. I read and reviewed Francis's second book, "Horse in the Dark" over ten years ago and was glad to read her most recent collection "The Shared World" (2023).

Vievee Francis has a distinctive poetical voice, highly emotive and personal. Her writing often is raw, blunt and angry, frequently on overdrive. She tends to write lengthy sentences filed with adjectives and descriptions and sometimes uses the form of the prose poem. Her work has a visceral character which benefits from reading aloud. (It was valuable to hear Francis reading on media from "The Shared World".)

Francis also draws heavily on the work and experiences of others. Her poems are replete with allusions to people including Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Marvin Gaye, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as well as European writers including Pablo Neruda and Czeslaw Milosz. Several poems also feature ordinary individuals as characters, strangers to the poet.

The poems are rough-edged with Francs reflecting on the struggles of her life, beginning with poverty and her family. She discusses race, Jim Crow, and gender. The poems display a toughness sometimes coming close to bitterness as Francis strives for a sense of resilience in herself.

The collection works beyond the sense of grievance and anger found in many of the individual poems to strive for what the title and the title poem term "The Shared World". The book's cover shows a photograph of a young Galway Kinnell (later a Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry) being comforted by Harriet Richardson after Kinnell had been hit in the head with a billy club in 1965 in Selma, Alabama. In the poem, "The Shared World" Richardson speaks to Kinnell of dreams for a future of human unity: "We are eager to get on with it./ To take in or do whatever forwards the living, this tripwire keeping us tied/kite to string, present to past, arrow/ to quiver." And so in an introductory poem to the collection, "Break Me and I'll Sing" the poet declaims "My voice like marrow, a blood yolk/spilled upon the counter. You can't stop this song. More hands than yours have closed around my throat."

The poems I liked include "I've Been Thinking about Love Again", the poems about Marvin Gaye, and "The Marsh King". The poems set in rural Texas brought back memories of Francis's earlier book, as did the many poems involving animals. The book is full of animals and their relationship to humans, including crows, goats, rats and rodents, cats, rabbits, and, especially, horses. Horses and humans frequently are melded together as in the title poem "Horse in the Dark" of the earlier collection and in the poem, "Dark Horse" with which "The Shared World" concludes.

"This is not the first time I've spoken of her.
Just a mare. Brown as any mare. My memory
has been tainted by my on age, so I remember
her as an older horse. Given to me because
her time as a hauler was done and her temperament
was gentle, or she had been broken. I don't know which,
maybe both. I loved her as much as a child could. Now,
I love her as much as a woman can, which means
we are indivisible. There is only one picture I have or her
and it is not on paper but in the mind: I am upon her
with my thin arms around her neck. No saddle, so
I could feel her as part of myself through the blanket.
It is easy to see she would move slowly as I do now.
I can feel the throb of her blood moving through
our dark body. And I know it for love. Not the only love
I would have. But the truest. What did the mare feel
of me? I would say, everything."

It was good to read Vievee Francis again and to share something of a troubled yet hopeful vision for a shared, connected world.

Robin Friedman