Casual Conversation

Renia White is the author of Casual Conversation (BOA Editions, 2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Originally from PG County, Maryland, her family relocated to the southside of Atlanta the same year she turned 13. She went on to earn her BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell University where she also taught. A BOAAT fellow, she received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award in poetry. Her work appears in publications such as The Offing, Slice, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in New York City.

“In Casual Conversation, White attends to an axiomatic ground in the pagefield. She teaches me something about the collaborative dreaming that we can be. I am saying that there is something for us here in the complex Quiets of this meditative, sustained, and intimately political work. It is something so vital and so unstoppably generative that I can only think to call it unrest.”—Aracelis Girmay, from the Foreword“Whether waxing philosophical or poetic or recalling the inner monologues of the humanspirit living moment to moment in lifetimes, telling tales of tattling, playing the dozens, ortestifying, recalling lynch ropes or racial memory, Renia White’s Casual Conversation is not casual nor conversant in the denouement of passivity, but are rigorously passionateinner monologues—interrogations, perhaps—preoccupied with the human eye, ear, andheart. In her muted Miles-Bearden collaged renderings, White is as bold and brash andconfident and causal as a musician, painter, filmmaker stopping us dead in our tracks(as Ntozake Shange reminds us poems should do like a kiss) at such self-assuredsoliloquies and spirited solos that are ‘just gorgeous.’ Her stilted syntax stutters leadyou into the poem slant yet makes you ‘come through the front door.’ In these ‘bluerummage,’ dialectics you marvel at the mastery as White splits the personal wide openfor the political (church burnings; confederate flag unlatching; mother-daughter remorseand reckoning) to merge and mingle with your ‘ear to the root’ of her blues: to whatmatters in her bright and shining ‘hope room’ of a debut.”—Tony Medina, author of I Am Alfonso Jones and Death, With Occasional Smiling“Casual Conversation, true to its title, contains poems of such killing nonchalance both in what they say and in the many unsayables finding space in-between memorable line after memorable line. The way Renia White finds and inhabits space is a stellar pushback against erasure and absence. A timely collection by a timeless poet.”—Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons: Poems