Casual Conversation

New Poets of America, Book 47

By: Renia White, Aracelis Girmay

Narrated by: Renia White

• Renia White is a first-time author. Her debut collection, Casual Conversation, was chosen by Aracelis Girmay as a Blessing the Boats Selection.
• Named in honor of Lucille Clifton’s National Book Award-winning collection, Blessing the Boats Selections spotlight new poetry collections by women poets of color. Previous Blessing the Boats Selections include Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes and Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez.
• Aracelis Girmay will write the Foreword for the collection, and her name will appear on the cover.

©2022 Renia White, Aracelis Girmay (P)2022 BOA Editions Ltd.

Critic reviews

“Whether waxing philosophical or poetic or recalling the inner monologues of the human spirit living moment to moment in lifetimes, telling tales of tattling, playing the dozens, or testifying, recalling lynch ropes or racial memory, Renia White’s Casual Conversation is not casual nor conversant in the denouement of passivity, but are rigorously passionate inner monologues—interrogations, perhaps—preoccupied with the human eye, ear, and heart. In her muted Miles-Bearden collaged renderings, White is as bold and brash and confident and causal as a musician, painter, filmmaker stopping us dead in our tracks (as Ntozake Shange reminds us poems should do like a kiss) at such self-assured soliloquies and spirited solos that are ‘just gorgeous.’ Her stilted syntax stutters lead you into the poem slant yet makes you ‘come through the front door.’ In these ‘blue rummage,’ dialectics you marvel at the mastery as White splits the personal wide open for the political (church burnings; confederate flag unlatching; mother-daughter remorse and reckoning) to merge and mingle with your ‘ear to the root’ of her blues: to what matters in her bright and shining ‘hope room’ of a debut.” —Tony Medina, author of I Am Alfonso Jones and Death, With Occasional Smiling

“Casual Conversation, true to its title, contains poems of such killing nonchalance both in what they say and in the many unsayables finding space in-between memorable line after memorable line. The way Renia White finds and inhabits space is a stellar pushback against erasure and absence. A timely collection by a timeless poet.” —Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons: Poems