Overview

Intimate and sweeping poetry that examines race and lineage Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with ""water on the brain""—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child. Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living? [sample poem] XI. the more ground covered, the more liberated you became I am scared my mind will turn on me. I am scared I will be naked in a burning house. I am scared my children won't outpace me. I am scared my children (who aren't made by me) believe I am a sad imitation of the others. I am scared I will gather in a room where everyone will ask me to remember and when I don't lie they'll say I'd hate to be you. I've lived long enough to be scared my kidneys will give out on me. I've lived long enough to know just when they should. I have never shared my fears with anyone; I am scared they will map the land and take liberties. Will the women be ashamed? I'm scared to ask. What will live again? What will die with me?

Full Product Details

Author:   Remica Bingham-Risher
Publisher:   Wesleyan University Press
Imprint:   Wesleyan University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.80cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 25.40cm
Weight:   0.318kg
ISBN:  

9780819502131

ISBN 10:   0819502138
Pages:   140
Publication Date:   31 October 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

Lost Friends In the Corridor MINNIE LEE FOWLKES (1859–1945) Birth Story On the plantation or, as some say, down home Battle of the Crater April when de war surrendered Wanderlust Strip Tobacco Like Greens Work Song Questions That Still Need Answering Putting Mother in the Ground Catching Babies Ruddy Seems Like We're Building A City RIOTING BREAKS OUT AT NORFOLK, VIRGINIA—Six persons were shot during a clash between whites and blacks in the negro sections of the city tonight. Four of the wounded are negroes, of whom two are expected to die. the Great Depression was hard to distinguish when poverty was always a way of life Night Class, Peabody High School The Tenderness of One Woman for Another Perhaps Minnie Sees Mary and Prays for Her Safekeeping MARY ETTA KNIGHT (1922 - 2007) Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane Founded in Petersburg, Virginia victims killed in 1922 were burned at the stake in a form of torture that most people today associate with the so-called Dark Ages.These horrific acts happened in modern [enter the name of the state where you were born], just a few generations ago. And white people caught the events on film and put the photos in their own family albums Mary perfects the Charleston, recalling it for the next eighty years Dear Doll June 18, 1941 Mary Taken to the Central Lunatic Asylum MASTER INDEX: CASE RECORD The color blue was full of darkness To Calm the Mind a fish has broken from the water its rod of a body Two Months and Thirteen Days Life's An Ever-turning Wheel Clean white homes and smiling black servants appropriately attired in language and dress Child With Playthings in Black and White Tweedle Dee, LaVern Baker The Negro Travelers' Green Book, 1957 remains of the stained glass windows of the 16th Street Baptist Church Rainy Night in Georgia, Brook Benton Ars Poetica #214 The Two White Women I Cleaned For Send Checks Until The Day I Die Or Until They Do Whichever Comes First Mary Admires James Brown's Casket There is going to be a resurrection of both the righteous and unrighteous WHAT WE HAD TO PASS THROUGH TO GET HERE Commemorative Headdress For Her Journey Beyond Heaven Eden Before the Fall: Southern Pastoral White Children and the Intimate Landscape of Defeat The black mammy, like the southern lady, was also born in the white mind 25 days after I am born because the scale of our breathing is planetary, at the very least The Domestic who is the Bearer of the Present THE LOSE YOUR MOTHER SUITE WHAT SURVIVED Minnie and Mary Live to 84 Where did you come from/how did you arrive? There Is Nothing In Your Story That Says You Should Be Here In My Best Dreams They Are On the Water Refusing Rilke's You must change your life I am trying to carve out a world where people are not the sum total of their disaster Room Swept Home Notes Photo Credits Selected Bibliography Acknowledgements

Reviews

""Remica Bingham-Risher fully embodies the role of 'poet as historian'...[She] has swept us all away to a new place, a home that is a blank slate. When you turn the final pages, there is sweetness. The extensive after materials read like a celebration. The acknowledgments; the detailed notes section for dozens of poems; and the selected bibliography are a complete, bustling gathering of all the people, art, and scholarship that has touched Bingham-Risher on this journey.""--Sara Everett, Diode ""You won't leave Room Swept Home without some joyful-noise-making, some weeping, some humming, some wild pride. I leave soothed and startled into recognition. I leave proclaiming my honest-to-God name. Remica Bingham-Risher ushers in the voices of all my kin. Her grandmothers are my own, are yours, are ours.""--Courtney Faye Taylor, author of Concentrate ""From the footnotes of history, Remica Bingham-Risher's poems skillfully call forth the ancestors whose blood fills her heart and fuels her poetic mind. Room Swept Home reminds us that our trauma is not the beginning or the end of our story.""--Amanda Johnston, 2024 Texas Poet Laureate ""In Remica Bingham-Risher's fearlessly imagined Room Swept Home, the author's paternal great-great-great grandmother and maternal grandmother cross paths. What is made from their proximity is not pure myth, but proof that 'every house with heat got a woman's hand in it.' Room Swept Home is a house with heat, and Remica Bingham-Risher is the woman whose meticulous hand made it so.""--Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure ""Opening with artfully constructed and impeccably researched Historical Poems before weaving her way to self, Remica Bingham-Risher's brilliant and tender Room Swept Home unfractures histories quilted across more than a century, offering answers to 'Questions That Still Need Answering, ' about enslavement, Catching Babies, Red Summer, Manic Depressive Psychosis, James Brown's gold casket, and more. Made all the more cinematic with poignant black and white photos and taking poets to school with an expert execution of poetic forms...readers will be grateful this poet has always found it difficult to hold her tongue.""--Frank X. Walker, author of Affrilachia ""Remica Bingham-Risher's Room Swept Home is a stunner. In these pages blood is time, time is history and, in this poet's knowing, deft hands a music rises from the ashes, from the bones, from the black women voices fathomed deep within her. She is their witness, their reclaimed testimony, their singing proof. Tell it right, Remica Bingham-Risher's grandmother tells the poet. She does. And how.""--Cornelius Eady, John C. Hodges Chair, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Co-founder, The Cave Canem Foundation

Author Information

REMICA BINGHAM-RISHER (Norfolk, VA) is director of quality enhancement plan initiatives at Old Dominion University. Her books include Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up, and What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error.

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