Fifteen
With his hopscotch grid for a wristsee my blue boywith a smile like a one-string guitar,relative to nobody,dropping out of school,out of line, sayingI love you more than life itselfin a first Valentine's cardduring the termin which we turn fifteen.In the attic of an old phone, now,here he is againin the drawer I was emptyingduring a hymn I was singingbefore I met him& here he is, my blue boy—now watch this older girl stop& throw her day out with the dust& turn blue, too.This whole impermanence thing is deceptive.Looks lifelong, actually, to mestill stuck here moulding Mason jarsof words to preserve him with,wondering if a poem ten years onis still a pining, askinghow many more I'll makehaving learned, at last,how little of us keeps.
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- February 14, 2024
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“Fifteen” from QUIET:POEMS: by Victoria Adukwei Bulley.
Published by Knopf on Feb 28, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Victoria Adukwei Bulley.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer, and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber in the UK and in North America by Alfred A. Knopf.
WINNER OF THE POLLARD INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE
Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library
“This debut poetry collection is abundant with thoughtful storytelling. Each poem is ruminative and distills the intimacies of Black girl/womanhood with fascinating images, compelling observations and a nomadic sense of questioning, while honouring the concept of silence and the ways it plays out in one’s interior life. These delicate poems unpick encounters with loved ones, friends and animals (there’s a beautiful poem about snails) and also focus firmly on the wider world, with poems such as 'Pandemic vs Black Folk' written with the sharpest of tongues.”
—Kadish Morris, The Guardian
“Clever and capacious poems . . . Bulley invites us in as she turns everything – intimate and secret, precious and precarious — inside out. . . . Bulley’s collection may begin quietly, but by the end her voice is clearly heard.”
—Sana Goyal, TLS
“[These] poems are so compelling that you won’t be able to stop reading them.”
—Elle
“A quiet revolution of a book — subtle, supple and serious . . . Tender and true, complex and profound, Quiet is a beautiful balancing act of a book — a debut that brings Adukwei Bulley fully formed, starting something.”
—2023 Rathbones Folio Prize Judges
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