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Explores the experience of enslaved women in the Americas through motherhood, grief, loss, and celebration of life.
Through a combination of personal narrative and historical research, Rupture weaves together the history of enslaved women in the Americas and themes of life, love, and loss. A nursery rhyme motif in the book juxtaposes the innocence of childhood and the insidious transgenerational trauma of slavery. The poems trace the author's own journey through pregnancy and into motherhood as it poses its own questions to the history of African American motherhood, inevitably imprinted by the legacy of slavery in the Americas. Ultimately, the book heralds the creativity and resilience that characterizes black life.
Adelle Monique is an Associate Professor and Chair of the English, Writing, and Communication Department at Emmanuel College where she teaches courses in literature and poetry writing. Her first collection—Anonymous—won the New Voices Award and her second collection, Rupture, was a finalist the Perugia Press Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Her book Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics is the first to juxtapose Cuba, Brazil, and the United States in a study of nineteenth-century women's poetry and the first to include the Lusophone literary tradition in a comparative study of African descendants in Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean. Her poems and translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Bayou Magazine, Evergreen Review, Obsidian, Transition Magazine, and Tupelo Quarterly. Monique has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brother's Fund.