In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, TherI Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she's heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.
TherI Alyce Pickens is Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana at Bates College and author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, also published by Duke University Press, and New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States.
This On This Day 2 The Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death 3 On March 12, 2020, Breonna Taylor 5 On Losing; A Hypothesis 6 Customary Calculus for Chronicity 7 Getting Dressed 9 Depression, Jacob Lawrence, 1950 10 If Lyndon B. Johnson hadn't had his heart attack 11 Remember the episode of Bones when 12 Ode to Checking My Shit 13 Anatomy of Soap 15 my lover says (my mind) 17 I found out I have something 18 Ursa Corregidora and Mary J. Blige Contemplate Life without Children 19 That Dispatches from the Pediatric Floor 22 Collar Is What Hangs around the Neck 23 I am watching a documentary about food, again 25 Corona Poem 26 T 27 On sex 28 Palimpsestina 29 The Amateur Gardener Contemplates Trauma 31 Apostrophe to Inspiration 32 Chronically Ill 34 On recompense 35 I tell her some of her ancestors must have snitched on Harriet Tubman 36 What You Don't See When Ben Vereen Guest Stars as Will's Father on The Fresh Prince, May 1994 37 Mind You What Had Happened Was 40 & The Third Variation on a Theme 56 Potential Ode or Elegy Out My Window 57 Neighborhood Watch 58 Coming Home 59 Ranunculus 61 It was just before Thanksgiving 62 June, 1018 63 Ursa Corregidora Goes to Junior High in the 1990s 64 Some Suicide Are Slow 65 I got into a Twitter beef with Lolo Jones over a blind white girl 67 What Cliff Should Have Told Theo on the Pilot of The Cosby Show, September 1984 68 Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Simon Godwin, National Theatre, 2019 70 my lover says (he doesn't remember) 72 I meet a man with a stutter 73 Let Me Holla at You Right Quick; or Notes 75 I Ain't Forgot about Y'all; or Acknowledgments 81
"In this engaging new collection of poetry, TherI Alyce Pickens demonstrates that she is a poet of depth, range, and often incisive humor. Her poems are a revelation." - John Keene, author of (Punks: New and Selected Poems) "What Had Happened Was is a daring poet's debut. First and foremost, I want to praise TherI Alyce Pickens's collection for its unflinching attention to the nuances of-and everyday sorts of elaborate formal play embedded in-African American vernacular. It's truly refreshing, and energizing, to see the dynamism of Black linguistic expression live a full life in contemporary American poetry this way. It's all here. Love and loss, theory and autobiography, the ordinary and the transcendent." - Joshua Bennett, author of (Spoken Word: A Cultural History) "Few debut poetry books are long awaited. Without a doubt, What Had Happened Was is. When you work tirelessly and patiently to master your art-with skill, wisdom, and an abundance of imagination-it reads like this." - Hayan Charara, author of (These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit: Poems) "TherI Alyce Pickens writes a poetics of the body that considers history, politics, race, gender, and the everyday mundane ways that they are experienced in bones, in the brain, and on the skin. While reading through What Had Happened Was, you may find that this Black poetics is crip poetics, is what people call the confessional voice. What Pickens confesses of the body is how the world makes the body a question. If you understand in depth the expression, the answer is in how one would begin: "What had happened was . . ." - Bettina Judd, author of (Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought) "In her constantly surprising and deftly built poems, TherI Alyce Pickens enacts a poetics that refuses binaries, attends to and extends the power of Black art, and centers a body navigating illness. Pickens seamlessly moves through and braids memory, history, pop culture. The language is precise and remarkable; it will engage and entangle you in marvelous ways---as will the formally inventive poems and the structure itself. Pickens has written an electric first book. The poems are still sparking in my mind." - Eduardo C. Corral, author of (Guillotine: Poems) "This collection demands attention and introspection by offering a raw yet eloquent portrayal of the intersections of history, identity, and systemic oppression. It's an essential read for people seeking to honor the complexity of the experiences of Black Americans." - Jessica Calaway (Library Journal)
