say here & it soundlike a heel shoved down a throat.a horse hitched. guttural. tough meat yanked,bones crushed by teeth minted in gold. soundlike a sixth generation curse when it flyout your mouth little god. a bolt cracking ‘crossfield laid flat beneath indigo clouds. you say come backheel & you mean your daddy too. meanwe are so ancient. how long we donelived— us-folk, for whom heavenis live broadcast. our down-at-the-heelplace. filthy & barefoot. double-wide on stilts.a body to be burned if need be, ’causealready. already no fear of fire in you.of sharp gill or heavy hand laid on your cheek.you’ve caught on early, turning—through cylinders of nature—root,rainfall to praise. making rubber tire, rustedscrap into playground. sun-bleached boats,fish nets are birds in your hand,there on the divine screen of poverty. ingenuity,beggar’s alchemy: what we got intowhat we ain’t meant to have. we’swho the earth is for, yousqueak. & you sing two kinds of people:your daddy & you: those who stay& those who escape the heel.
Ode to Hushpuppy
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- October 24, 2020
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“Ode to Hushpuppy” from HORSEPOWER: by Joy Priest.
Published by University of Pittsburgh Press, September 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Joy Priest.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Prize and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, and Poetry Northwest, among others. Her essays have appeared in Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated, and her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019. Priest has been a journalist, theater attendant, waitress, and fast-food worker in Kentucky, and has facilitated writing workshops and arbitration programs with adult and juvenile incarcerated women. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
“Horsepower, Joy Priest’s debut collection, is a captivating display of might and elegance, a language of astonishing sinew through which the backdrop of place and a compelling life come into vivid focus. Undergirding these poems is a restless, resilient spirit: an urgent grappling with the desire to both remember and outrun the past, with history both personal and communal, and the complexities of American racism in its most intimate manifestation—familial love. Throughout this remarkable debut, Priest shows us what it means to clear the stall, break out of the traces, and run unbridled into life.”
—Natasha Tretheway
“Horsepower tells what it is to be a bridge in one's family between racism and a love forged in defiance of racism; it tells what it is to need to both escape that role and embrace it. And, just as importantly, it tells the arrival of a powerful new poet, a poet to whose stories I will continue to listen.”
—Shane McCrae
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