Picking Scabs from the Body History - Godley, Joanne

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Résumé :
Picking Scabs from the Body History, opens with an ode to a library wherein a nine-year-old girl is invited in to read. She quickly discovers, in the book she picks up (We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People), a historical narrative fraught with injustices that bristles the hair on my fearful arms, and sees photos of lynching victims and treed men swing with hung heads/ mouths stuffed full. Poems in the collection exposes the dark underbelly of history-the sore spots or scabs of history. There is a poem relating another genocide-this time of the American native peoples. Yet another poem describes the theft of genetic material from Henrietta Lacks that spawned a multibillion-dollar stem cell industry, the injustices meted out to Haiti-the first nation to cast off enslavement. Godley includes poems from her own life experiences: from witnessing a coup d'?tat in Cote d'Ivoire to a personal tryst with members of the Black Panther Party to the rebellion in the 1970's in Detroit, Michigan. These are poems of witness, of protest and of empowerment. They are commentaries on the mis-written truths about race, violence and injustice and of the targeted peoples involved reclaiming their place in history.

Biographie:
Joanne Godley is a practicing physician, poet and writer whose work is informed by social injustices. She is a native of Detroit residing in Alexandria, Virginia. She is convinced she is a descendant of nomads because traveling is one of her great passions (along with art collecting, salsa dancing and cycling). She spent time working in Africa as a Peace Corps medical officer. Godley's lyric memoir was a finalist for the Kore Press Memoir contest and the Sunshots Press Prose Contest, and it received honorable mentions in the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book contest and the National Woman's Book Association Contest. She completed an online novel writing certification program through Stanford University. Her first novel was ranked finalist in Kimbilio's annual novel writing contest.Three of her poems were published in an anthology. A flash creative nonfiction work was recently published in the Kenyon Review blog and a flash noir fiction piece appears on the Akashiac Press blog, Mondays are Murder. Godley attended the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in 2018 and the Kenyon Writers Workshop in 2019. She is a member of the Women's Fiction Writing Association, the Author's Guild and the NWBA.