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?
Praise for Room Swept Home
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Absolutely stunning! This love tome to foremothers, this homage to the women, Black still dreaming and pulsing in her veins, is so much more than “Poet as Historian” making the dead come alive. 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, this collection will lift you up with exquisite lines like, “We the industry, we the communion. The engine and offering, the wheels turning,” and “Grandmothers are small planets, granddaughters, moons or rings,” so often readers will be grateful this poet has always found it difficult to hold her tongue.” –Amanda Johnston, 2024 Texas Poet Laureate
