What do you think?
Rate this book
Village
Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement.
In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of “survivor,” getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.
In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of “survivor,” getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.
112 pages, Paperback
First published February 7, 2023
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Read
December 22, 2022Part instruction manual, part celebration, part dance party, part garden tour, Village refuses compartmentalization, demanding engaged and engaging ways of looking at and talking about difficult shared experiences. Rather than embalmment, these poems want mushroom suits. Winged relatives are welcome as much as two-legged ones. This is an urban book, and an international one: Harlem, Rio Vermelho, New Zealand, the Carolinas. Places far afield and closer to home. Village focuses on the human animal and those we live alongside (grizzlies, caterpillars, mothers, rattlers, shopkeepers, rats). Cross-hatched and sideways, gray-scaled, staggered, variously aligned, and direct. In English, Portuguese, Tsalagi, Māori, Arabic, Yoruba, and more. These poems by Latasha N. Nevada Diggs reveal the richly diverse ecosystem of what a limited imagination might sideline as a “marginalized” life.
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/14-...
Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/14-...
April 18, 2023
What does it mean to write a poetic portrait of a mother who was not the mother you would have wanted or needed but was the mother you had? How do you understand motherhood when you are being a mother and the mother you had is a complicated presence? Are there responsibilities to writing an elegy? To understanding a life? To giving someone, like your own mother, the grace to be the person she was, but still acknowledging her influence on your life?
For me, Diggs's book is saturated with questions like this. Intentionally obscuring the answers. This is a difficult book, because it's dealing with difficult questions. And its occasion is a difficult moment. It seems her mother has passed, or is suffering from a health condition that makes the poet consider what it will mean for her to pass. And now the poet has to consider what it means to have had such a toxic relationship with her mother. What did it do to her childhood? How can she recognize she still had a childhood despite her mother's addictions and all the consequences that came from that?
Everywhere I go I see questions. Or maybe making these moments questions helps me protect myself in my reading. How to account for the poem, "The Last Days of Pompeii: An Installation," where the poet assembles the household of her childhood, an assembly that includes the alcoholic habits of her mother and father. Or the awkward sexual encounter in "Shadiq (or was it Ejoe?)." The "village" of Diggs's book really is a population of encounters and lived experiences and people living around her and her mother while she was growing up. For me, the book is as much an account of what her mother did to her childhood as it is a recognition that there were many people that recognized her as a child while she was growing up. And the latter doesn't reconcile the former, it just complicates what all of it means.
For me, Diggs's book is saturated with questions like this. Intentionally obscuring the answers. This is a difficult book, because it's dealing with difficult questions. And its occasion is a difficult moment. It seems her mother has passed, or is suffering from a health condition that makes the poet consider what it will mean for her to pass. And now the poet has to consider what it means to have had such a toxic relationship with her mother. What did it do to her childhood? How can she recognize she still had a childhood despite her mother's addictions and all the consequences that came from that?
Everywhere I go I see questions. Or maybe making these moments questions helps me protect myself in my reading. How to account for the poem, "The Last Days of Pompeii: An Installation," where the poet assembles the household of her childhood, an assembly that includes the alcoholic habits of her mother and father. Or the awkward sexual encounter in "Shadiq (or was it Ejoe?)." The "village" of Diggs's book really is a population of encounters and lived experiences and people living around her and her mother while she was growing up. For me, the book is as much an account of what her mother did to her childhood as it is a recognition that there were many people that recognized her as a child while she was growing up. And the latter doesn't reconcile the former, it just complicates what all of it means.
November 6, 2024
I am hereby smitten with the poetry collection "Village." In this book, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs delivers a series of electric poems concerning what we leave behind when we depart and somewhat related, what remains. Diggs can be funny; Diggs can be harsh. Her paean to junkies, "a proposal" confronts a culturally collective bias against addicts that should be rethought; her "Artist's Statement" confronts us as a society when examining her mother's inability to find a better life up North. There's humor and reality checking the reader in both. Diggs entertains and she educates, for sure. She's also got a hangman poem with missing letters ["Performance (cont.): CASKET/CONTAINER"]; a few fill-in-the-blank poems ("Evelyn 'Champagne' King"); gridlike visual poems inviting you to choose your own path ("Great American Songbook"); and poems incorporating Tsalagi ("usdi") leaving you to translate the Cherokee language on your own. What's consistent is Diggs' exuberant energy. Her verses are so strikingly engaged with the world that you will find yourself looking at what surrounds you -- and what you'd like to leave behind -- anew.
March 2, 2024
I’m very glad I read these poems. The author reveals her village in word and form. She celebrates the heroin addicts who sometimes provided child care. She captures the wonder and the awe and the imagination of life where she is from. It is a fascinating and interesting piece of work. The work grew and grew and grew on me as I read..
November 30, 2024
These poems are so good. The first section, which is a series of poems that explain the speaker's final requests, was probably my favorite part. But overall, just a technically impressive and emotionally moving collection about what it means to be a daughter.
September 22, 2024
reading digitally not the move for this one
the formatting was real fucked up on hoopla
the formatting was real fucked up on hoopla
July 24, 2025
SIX WORD REVIEW: Innovative, uninhibited, and sprawling between languages.
December 18, 2025
“the performance is a ceremony. The Artist is making herself well.”
Latasha N. Diggs parcels through her past with vocal exuberance and various textures, to reckon with grief and to build community. The book opens with the image of her ID card for food stamps, sandwiching her name on a page between this and a photo of her mother’s ID card for food stamps. The title page follows, contextualizing the collection in her familial history, especially centered on the relationship with her mother. In writing to this relationship, she works through the prevailing trauma of poverty in lineage, as well as casting a tender image of family. This relationship frames the collection in terms of memory, class, and persisting community which creates Digg’s Village.
The voice of Diggs anchors through the multiple formats, with many of the poems emphasizing alliteration, beat, and playful word sequences.“nuclear naivety nestled near nativity’s nectar :: / naturally all blackouts are nightmares” the lines read, when meditating on alcoholism witnessed in a past memory. This soundscape echoes traditions of spoken word and New York dialect, more precisely Harlem, and the multiple cultures Diggs identifies with. She also directly places lyrics from music icons in lines next to her own, or layered on top of each other. In the “Great American Song Book” the words are nearly all lyrics, shown in quotes and placed around in different orientations on the page. It feels like Diggs creates a kind of inventory of voices and inspirations here, which is further shown in her selection of visual accompaniments. Another important texture of her work is the way she weaves in multiple languages, translating them at the end of the collection in a section titled “a kind of selective glossary”. The heteroglossia works together to make a fluid poetic voice, contributing to the communal feeling of the greater work.
Throughout the book, many systems of categorization or organization are maneuvered into the poetic form. For example, the opening poem which splits and continues throughout the first section of the book, sort of mimics the language found in funerary instructions. Called “Performance” she looks toward the future where she’s entrusted her memorial service(s) to those “trusted”: three distinct parties, two held in New York and one on the beach in Rio Vehelmo. She has specific requests for things like food and music, but also leaves much up to those carrying out her “will”. This envisions the future as a place where her community continues to flourish, her death procession itself another party, an ongoing performance after life ends.
In “a proposal for the Mayoral Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers” Diggs interprets public forms of memorializing. This poem imagines an uptown sculpture of two people named “Cowboy & Billy” and other “neighborhood heroin addicts who served as ‘foster parents’.” By pedestaling beloved members of her life over sculptures of well known individuals, the work questions memorializing certain figures over those who are contributing to building community in the day to day, especially community members often shunned by the governing bodies that create these monuments. The poems that follow continue this thread, in writing through ideas of art installations and artist statements in proposal-like formats.
I felt invigorated while reading this book, the diversity of writing forms and textures was fun, inviting and nuanced in their commentary. The collection is a space where the poet imagines, remembers and immortalizes her village.
Latasha N. Diggs parcels through her past with vocal exuberance and various textures, to reckon with grief and to build community. The book opens with the image of her ID card for food stamps, sandwiching her name on a page between this and a photo of her mother’s ID card for food stamps. The title page follows, contextualizing the collection in her familial history, especially centered on the relationship with her mother. In writing to this relationship, she works through the prevailing trauma of poverty in lineage, as well as casting a tender image of family. This relationship frames the collection in terms of memory, class, and persisting community which creates Digg’s Village.
The voice of Diggs anchors through the multiple formats, with many of the poems emphasizing alliteration, beat, and playful word sequences.“nuclear naivety nestled near nativity’s nectar :: / naturally all blackouts are nightmares” the lines read, when meditating on alcoholism witnessed in a past memory. This soundscape echoes traditions of spoken word and New York dialect, more precisely Harlem, and the multiple cultures Diggs identifies with. She also directly places lyrics from music icons in lines next to her own, or layered on top of each other. In the “Great American Song Book” the words are nearly all lyrics, shown in quotes and placed around in different orientations on the page. It feels like Diggs creates a kind of inventory of voices and inspirations here, which is further shown in her selection of visual accompaniments. Another important texture of her work is the way she weaves in multiple languages, translating them at the end of the collection in a section titled “a kind of selective glossary”. The heteroglossia works together to make a fluid poetic voice, contributing to the communal feeling of the greater work.
Throughout the book, many systems of categorization or organization are maneuvered into the poetic form. For example, the opening poem which splits and continues throughout the first section of the book, sort of mimics the language found in funerary instructions. Called “Performance” she looks toward the future where she’s entrusted her memorial service(s) to those “trusted”: three distinct parties, two held in New York and one on the beach in Rio Vehelmo. She has specific requests for things like food and music, but also leaves much up to those carrying out her “will”. This envisions the future as a place where her community continues to flourish, her death procession itself another party, an ongoing performance after life ends.
In “a proposal for the Mayoral Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers” Diggs interprets public forms of memorializing. This poem imagines an uptown sculpture of two people named “Cowboy & Billy” and other “neighborhood heroin addicts who served as ‘foster parents’.” By pedestaling beloved members of her life over sculptures of well known individuals, the work questions memorializing certain figures over those who are contributing to building community in the day to day, especially community members often shunned by the governing bodies that create these monuments. The poems that follow continue this thread, in writing through ideas of art installations and artist statements in proposal-like formats.
I felt invigorated while reading this book, the diversity of writing forms and textures was fun, inviting and nuanced in their commentary. The collection is a space where the poet imagines, remembers and immortalizes her village.
November 17, 2025
creates an architecture in the mouth, but also resists that. Either way the shape is it’s down tongue feel. Read it out loud.
certain draw to it from my time in Harlem.
Also is unabashed in its lineage which I am always trying
certain draw to it from my time in Harlem.
Also is unabashed in its lineage which I am always trying
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews