A revelatory work in the tradition of Claudia Rankine's Citizen,
DaMaris Hill's searing and powerful narrative-in-verse bears witness
to American women of color burdened by incarceration.
“It is costly to
stay free and appear / sane.”
From Harriet Tubman
to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives
Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn,
despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound
Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences
with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes,
illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout.
For black American
women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the
bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of
women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era’s
prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of
incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and
died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social,
intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and
lethal.
In A Bound Woman Is
a Dangerous Thing, Hill presents bitter, unflinching history that
artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet
unbridled African-American women. Hill’s passionate odes to Zora
Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha
Kitt, and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their
load and light, binding history, author, and reader in an essential
legacy of struggle.
*The Sentencing
Project