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What Do You Know?

2021
Author(s)
Ariana Fields
Publisher
Enchanted Lion Books

“Authors and sisters Girmay and Fields give voice to a variety of beings, imagining love itself asking, ‘What do you know?’ and listening carefully to the response. The question is asked of a well, bees, and a forest, among other entities. ‘When love comes to the farmers and asks,/ What do you know,’ one spread reads, a farmer responds: ‘I know work and weather/ and the hands of the sun and the rain.’ In softly tinted art with the feel of sketchbook pages, a brown-skinned farmer carries heavy baskets across her shoulders. … Fields draws as if setting down memories or dreams, with forms that repeat: people and birds with downcast gazes, bears with great claws, landscapes that undulate like ocean waves. Employing incantatory lines that conjure flame-like warmth and reverence, Girmay and Fields acknowledge the kind of knowing that’s older than books.“ —Publishers Weekly

What do you know?” Love asks this of honeybees, a historian, fruit bats, a farmer, and a rock. With each poetic, wholly distinctive response to Love’s question, one thing is consistently reaffirmed—the unique wisdom possessed by all that is alive. This respect for the singular contributions we each can make was deeply integral to the creation process of this book itself. A collaboration between two sisters, both of whom wrote it, one of whom illustrated it, this illustrated poem holds space for mystery, wonder, and surprise, and for the elaboration of more questions through which to see and feel the world.

About the Author

Aracelis Girmay is a poet who makes works across genres. She is the author of the poetry collections the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007). For this work she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her books have also been named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Connecticut Book Award. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cave Canem Foundation, among others. Girmay is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, and was a flower, made in collaboration with book artist Valentina Améstica. Other recent work includes a picture book collaboration with her sister entitled What Do You Know? and the forthcoming picture book collaboration with artist Diana Ejaita entitled Kamau and Zuzu Find A Way, both with Enchanted Lion Books. Recent works (poetry and prose) have been published or are forthcoming in AstraThe Paris Review online, Periphery Journal, Jewish Currents, The New York Times Magazine, and e-flux

Girmay is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). She is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the editor-at-large of the Blessing the Boats Selections (BOA Editions).