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Join us on Monday, March 20 at 6 PM where the Poetry Book Club will be discussing Mahogany L. Browne's new collection Chrome Valley.
We will be meeting inside the bookstore on the College St. level (upstairs). Part of the meeting will be devoted to reading selected poems that we find meaningful from the text along with a dialogue around those and other themes that flow through the book.
From Lincoln Center’s inaugural poet-in-residence comes this unflinching collection that intricately mines the experience of being a Black woman in America.
Boldly lyrical and fiercely honest, Mahogany L. Browne’s Chrome Valley offers an intricate portrait of Black womanhood in America. “We praise their names / & the hands that write / Praise the mouth that speaks,” she writes in tribute to those who came before her.
Browne captures a quintessential girlhood through the pleasures and pangs of young love: the thrill of skating hip to hip at the roller rink, the heat of holding hands in the dark, and, sometimes, the sting of a palm across the cheek. Friendship, too, comes with its own complex yearnings: “you ain’t had freedom / ’til you climb on bus 62 / & head to the closest mall / for a good seat at the girl fight.”
Mahogany L. Browne, selected as one of the Kennedy Center's Next 50, is the executive director of JustMedia, founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair, and artistic director of Urban Word NYC. Her most recent works are Woke: A Young Poet's Guide to Justice and the young adult novel Vinyl Moon.
Book club books may be purchased at a 20% discount. Ask for details in the bookshop or at the meeting.
