7/11/2023 0 Comments Redux bookDazzling in ambition, Lucy Negro, Redux draws back the bright skin of language to reveal a raw and original (Blk!) nerve.Economists seem to be everywhere in the media these days. Williams writes, “Lucy, Lucy, even you’s God’s flesh."/This world ain’t wanna see that yet.” As Williams’ (and Lucy’s) readers, we are asked to witness the piecing vision of this collection, which is astute in its nuanced gaze at the psyche of poetry as flesh. Black Luce, no longer stranded and silenced in a colorless narrative, blazes and burns with agency in Williams’ symphonic odium of desire, race, and history. Brilliant, sensual, and always powerful, Lucy Negro, Redux dares us (and all Others) to gaze directly at the complex silhouette of beauty shackled inside of Shakespeare’s famous ‘Dark Lady Sonnets’, and the playwright’s own shrouded avowal “…I will declare that Beauty herself is black.” Explicit in imagination and invention, Williams’ achievement in these pages examines the (mis)coded vernacular of desire and its relationship to blackness, in plain sight. “Caroline Randall Williams’ debut collection of poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux, is a fearless, mesmerizing accomplishment. The author has successfully avoided that debut we tend to disown later in our writing careers rather, Randall Williams has produced a manuscript that should be heard, sung, examined, then reexamined until Lucy comes crawling out our collective eyes, ears, throats and reticence.” - Derrick Harriell, author of Cotton, Ropes, and Strippers in Wonderland This is an unapologetic Black sonnet/song. This is more than historical poetry that relays facts. As much as Lucy is historical artifact, she is a voice we need right now. Randall Williams reminds us that the past is created from the now moment. The rhythmic vernacular and authentic lexicon urges us to read these poems out loud: I break it if I bought it,/ I own it if I caught it,/ I spend it if I got it./ Is this a 16thcentury European or the reincarnation of Bessie Smith? She is both. Lucy Negro is no one’s muse, side-piece, or hush thing she is an ironic blues in a familiar Shakespearean tapestry. The voice in these exceptional poems is an active subversion to deep-rooted, but still relevant, western misogyny. “In Lucy Negro, Redux, Caroline Randall Williams has unearthed a new folk hero, a harbinger of the suppressed Black feminine. This is stunning work.” - Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Heavy. More than any book I’ve read in the last decade, Williams forces us to reckon with our own investments in vengeance, folly and tenderness. Williams gives us adorned black women tricksters, bluesy interracial situations and relationships without an iota of sentimentality or aw shucksism. Thank God! In a literary landscape where we usually get one or the other from literary art, this is a massive achievement. “Caroline Randall Williams’s Lucy Negro, Redux is as finely polished as it provocatively dirty. More praise for Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet: Move over Othello, no more easy getting’ ovah, Lucy Negro aka Black Luce has, double-brilliantly and double inventively, fully arrived on fire! To add more heat, Williams’ book has been adapted to the ballet stage by Nashville Ballet’s Paul Vasterling with music composed by Rhiannon Giddens. Whiteness Him Bad Bard Self, William Shakespeare. Travel with Williams through the sublime racial moments of famous sonnets to a cultural critique of the work of Mr. Williams unearths Lucy by working her own mojo of intelligent vengeance and a dual aesthetic of inquiry and minimal, tour de force exegesis. Part Savvy Lit Crit, part Blues chart, part hip revenge-femme-lyric, part imagined Interracial Romance Saga disguised as poems, in Lucy Negro, Redux:The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet, poet Caroline Randall Williams plays the literary Race Card and cuts the whole deck, moving backwards in time in and forward in mind, archeologically offering a precise and seductive command performance of the hidden temperament of a specific and beautiful “Dark Lady”–both used and loved. Especially black female voices.” - The New York Times Above all it is a witty and audacious rejoinder to literary history and its systematic suppression of female voices. “… An unflinching investigation of otherness and a dead-sexy exploration of the intersection of identity and desire. The book of poems Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet by Caroline Randall Williams is now a major ballet!! Now also available as an eBook from, Apple Books, , or anywhere eBooks are sold
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