Tuesday night was a special First Person Plural Harlem reading, as it brought three thrilling poets all published through Belladonna Collaborative to the FPP stage.  The Belladonna* mission is to “promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable and dangerous with language.”  r. erica doyle, Tonya Foster, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs were all that and more!

r.erica doyle began the night by incanting Trinidad through its language and rhythms– a Trinidad alive and present in doyle’s voice.  She read next an epic of “unrequited love” from her collection, proxy, which spanned enough iterations of love and sex and urgent (brainy, raw, sexy) dislocutions to last a lifetime.  We held onto the edges of our seats!

Tonya Foster began with “A Mathmatics of Chaos,” an essay about New Orleans that turns into an “Bibliography,” a spell-binding compendium of the language of her home from A to Z and back again to A– the by-words, watch-words, and front porch conversations that define New Orleans from within and without.  She went on to read from “A Swarm of Bees in High Court,” her poetry collection forthcoming from Belladonna*.  She gave us a spare and arresting music, with lines like, “…as if to show him the winter between words and his budding fists.”

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs closed out the evening with riveting multi-media renditions of poems from her collection, Twerk, also from Belladonna*.  She laid down and looped vocal tracks– beats, soaring calls, chatter, and melodic lines– then layered the finely-tuned rhythms of her poems over the tracks.  And with each piece, the layers deepened as the poems folded in another language or dialect, giving us the ultimate in hybridity, a global polyglot.  Japanese, Maori, Olelo Hawai’i, Spanish, creoles from around the world.  Her pieces were songs, they were manifestos; they were in turns joyful, comedic, and searing. Her work filled the room and we were literally hollering for more.

As we will say to people for a long to come: it was really something special. We hope to see you at our next event on November 19th!