Who's Your Daddy

Arisa White channels the ear of Zora Neale Hurston, the tongue of Toni Cade Bambara, and the eye of Alice Walker in the wondrous Who's Your Daddy. She channels Guyanese proverbs, Shango dreams, games of hide and seek, and memories of an absentee father to shape the spiritual condition. What she makes is "a maze that bobs and weaves a new style whenever there's a demand to love." What she gives us are archives, allegories, and wholly new songs.

-Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins

". . . absence breeds madness, an irreconcilable relationship you know is there but can't call it by its name . . ."

In these crisply narrative poems, which unreel like heart-wrenching fragments of film, Arisa White not only names that gaping chasm between father and daughter, but graces it with its true and terrible face. Every little colored girl who has craved the constant of her father's gaze will recognize this quest, which the poet undertakes with lyric that is tender and unerring.

-Patricia Smith, Incendiary Art

Somewhere nearing its end, Arisa White says of Who's Your Daddy, it's "a portrait of absence and presence, a story, a tale, told in patchwork fashion . . ." This exactly says what Who's Your Daddy is, though it doesn't say all it takes to do justice to the mythic paradox an absent parent guarantees a child, young or grown, or what it takes to live with and undergo such birthright. There's not only a father's absence and presence, there's a mother who says "you raise your daughters, and love your sons," there are stepfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, a grandmother, brothers, lovers, all of whom leave their marks and give and take love. Surrounding the whole book hovers the questions do I forgive him, and is forgiveness possible? This beautifully, honestly conceived genius of a book shook me to the core. -Dara Wier, You Good Thing