Mend: Poems
The inventor of the speculum, J. Marion Sims, is celebrated as the "father of modern gynecology," and a memorial at his birthplace honors "his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike." These tributes whitewash the fact that Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on eleven enslaved African American women. Lent to Sims by their owners, these women were forced to undergo operations without their consent. Today, the names of all but three of these women are lost.
In Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims's autobiography: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims's lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as "bruised fruit." At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience.
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Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in a chapbook, Something of Yours, and in several journals and anthologies, including Blackbird, Berkeley Poetry Review, African American Review, pluck! and Obsidian. Maples teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
"This is a powerful book that illuminates one more complex, disturbing chapter of the African-American experience, a nineteenth-century white male physician's gynecological experiments on female slaves. Mend is a brutal story, lyrically told in the voices of three of those women, and its author has memorably created both a painful reminder and a beautiful tribute." -- Kim Addonizio, from the runner up citation for The Donald Hall Prize
"Maples' skill as a poet pours through every page of this book. This is difficult material, but she illuminates it with carefully shaped lines and flowing prose poems. Her voice is vivid, urgent. Every line is powerful. Mend is necessary and magnificent." -- New York Journal of Books
"With Mend, Kwoya Fagin Maples is equal parts teacher and poet: releasing a part of history that needed to be told, she's brought dignity and light to the women of Mt. Meigs; further, she's urging readers to learn and listen, to not repeat the ugliness hidden in our white-washed past. This is a must-read book for anyone, timeless and worth any praise Maples may yet garner for it." -- Alabama Writers' Forum
