From award-winning author Diamond Forde comes a stunningly powerful poetry collection exploring lineage and the legacy of survival as seen through the life of her grandmother Alice—a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South—using the King James Bible as a narrative framework.
“Alice / a god-song, swings still in the high / branch of our throats. I miss her, wonder / what she plants in heaven’s mulch.”
When her grandmother Alice died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn copy of the KJV Bible to remember her by. Borrowing forms, themes, and characters from its pages, Diamond resurrects her memory in a new sacred text: The Book of Alice. With rich, surprising language and formal dexterity, these poems retell the story of her life.
Born in rural North Carolina, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Exploring themes of oppression, liberation, and redemption, Forde draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of Alice and other Black women, so often relegated to the margins of history. These poems feature the voices of Lot’s wife, Sethe from Morrison’s Beloved, and even the sow from Noah’s ark, and embody creative apocryphal forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures.
More than a poetry collection, The Book of Alice is a dialogue with the past, a meditation on the present, and a road map for the future. Essential reading for anyone drawn to the intersections of race, gender, history, and the unyielding power of personal stories, The Book of Alice is a heartfelt elegy and an invitation to find strength in the roots of our shared humanity.
