American Sycamore by Lisbeth White
American Sycamore is an exploration of racial identity and the natural world, rooted in the mythopoetics of wilderness and ancestry as sources of trauma, grief, wonder, and tremendous resource. In pursuit of understanding the nuances of belonging and displacement in a Black mixed-race feminine body, Lisbeth White travels through mythic, biological, and geological landscapes, attending to the body and its beautiful and terrifying questions. Her journey manifests in a poetic helix of recurring bridges, trees, myths, origins, and awakenings. From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, these poems traverse global terrain while interrogating the dark past/present of America. In American Sycamore, the poet examines the Black diaspora, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine, inviting the reader into a deep conversation of seeking and recovery.
Bridge (they think I am Dutch)
They think I am Dutch here: another caramel-something picturesque
in this Netherlands city park amidst the weaving bicycles and willows
weeping over the duck pond.
Because eventually diaspora relocates origin? Because mixed ancestry
mixes it up everywhere? I am addressed in Dutch as much as in
English. In French. In Spanish. No one can guess how to speak to me.
If I could speak all the languages, still I would always be most afraid
I would never be able to say how it is the world moves through me. I
learn to copy the voices of others and live within their masks.
The truth is I’m nostalgic for a beingness unmarkable. A bodyscape
un-delineated. A landscape unmapped. Unmappable. Recognized
simply, by tree, by evening light, by direction of wind in grasses.
A landscape intimate with secret monikers, known only by the one
who utters the calling. Precious as it sounds when I cup my palm
before my mouth, when I speak into my hands my own name.
Early in her book American Sycamore, made of poems as formally adventurous and probing and searching as the questions she asks, questions that might never be answered—about family, history, empire, violence, love—Lisbeth White writes, almost as a kind of prayer: ‘the bones the bones know who i am.’ The bones of course are the literal bones—of who came before us, of who loved us before we were born, of who were brutalized in the uncountable, unsayable ways. The bones are also the poems she has crafted. Which is to say, what music she’s grown from the sorrow.
—Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
Lisbeth White’s debut poetry collection, American Sycamore, holds an enchanting power with its exploration of Black/multiracial culture, ancestors, and the mythic wild around and within us—its movement from California to the Southwestern desert to Europe. It is a journey toward and from, a letting loose of identity formed without consent, and the grief of lost family, of the past, of the self. Woven throughout are trees, holding stories both personal and collective, the brutal fist of a nation bent on white violence and avoiding its racial reckoning.
—Angela Maria Spring, Washington Independent Review of Books
The poems in American Sycamore are talismans, and we need them for the long journey toward belonging somewhere and somehow. For White, a Black mixed-race poet, the body is a battleground for myth and action, her ‘whole body/a cross-referenced wound.’ This is a book of travel and the restlessness of the human spirit to incorporate an inheritance of competing stories. What struck me was the need in this poet to take on the daunting task of healing a legacy of slavery and racism within herself, to find the right apology for all of us. We need to sit up and take notice here. American Sycamore is a fine book.
—Amber Flora Thomas, author of Eye of Water: Poems