Joy in the Belly of a Riot - by Barbara Fant (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The acclaimed poetic force celebrates the practice of poetry as healing and prayer in this vital, life-affirming collection about surviving the void and touching the divine--the second book in a creative collaboration between Amistad and Moore Black Press.

At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. "I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world.," she recalls. "I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing . . . it became my way to pray."

Rebirth, renewal, and healing are the heart of Joy in the Belly of a Riot. Fant's monumental collection is a continuation of her lifelong project of using poetry as prayer; this is healing-informed poetry to restore herself, her community, and the world. Exquisitely lyrical and boldly resonant, Fant's poems excavate the nightmares of a childhood marked by poverty, violence, racism, and the loss of countless loved ones. Suffering seemed endemic to neighborhoods like hers, and yet, in Fant's own words, "I keep trying to write about the trauma, but the joy won't let me."

Steeped in a rich Black Christian tradition and drawing on Scripture for artistic inspiration, Fant's verse offers solace and guidance for all, from the devout to the skeptical. In these poems Fant demands that we see her, and her community, throug more than our grief. As she closes this profound collection, Fant gently preaches that we choose life and reminds us that "wholeness is our birthright."

Joy in the Belly of a Riot is a healing balm in times of sustained uncertainty and a rock upon which we can build and sustain a foundation of joy. Fant's essential message demands to be heard, now more than ever.

Review Quotes

Barbara Fant gives testimony and a blueprint for surviving. Fant revives the people with her poetry and studies each line, like one might study love. With true tenderness, she scribes liberatory practices and prayers; affirmations and songs, a healing song for us wearied by journey. A salve for the numb. Here are the poems we didn't know we needed, they give birth to bravery and give us space to "find the strength to fly". -- Mahogany L. Browne, Author of A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe & Poet-in-Residence @ Lincoln Center, NY

"Barbara Fant's deep reflections on grief and injustice contain a certain romanticism, but it is always reigned in by a pragmatic interrogation of what those beasts have done to Black life. Not even God escapes her emotional scalpel, and her cuts are deep, but not without light or love. For every shadow there is an ecstatic reckoning around the corner. Hers is a protest made of solemn magic and that conjures a better world whether it wishes to be one or not." -- Scott Woods, author of Black Night is Falling

"Some art will sit you down and make you look at your own beautiful self, force you to recognize it and find joy, the same kind you don't think you deserve. Or deserve right now. Joy in the Belly of a Riot cradles your face gently, and with its plutonic lips to your mouth, will tug up from you a response. If not your words, then your body, hoisted by a chain of inspired verbs till you're no longer nonverbal. That is Fant's power on the page, the kind that raises bodies." -- Natashia Deón, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Perishing and Grace

"While her poems glimpse at a collective melancholy and ache, experiencing this collection is an embodied exaltation of resilience and joy. This collection is an intimate exposition; it's whispered resignations and bellowing truths." -- Dasha Kelly Hamilton, Poet Laureate Emerita for the City of Milwaukee & the State of Wisconsin

"joy in the belly of a riot descends from storm clouds like a multicolored kite string and compels readers to grab hold and, most importantly, hold on. To craft this string, Barbara Fant braids together poems of darker colors like grief, longing, and frustration with brighter pops of hope, love, and faith. Each poem pulls us into a world where survival, whether through the night or through a life, requires us to look for reasons to hold on - to hold on to each other, to our memories, to our dreams, to our beliefs, and to our joy." -- bridgette bianca, author of be/trouble

"Barbara Fant's poems are smoldering affirmations. They singe first! Much like the tactile force in Ntozake Shange and Maya Angelou's works, Fant's text arrives always in service to the withering truth. The bounty of healing Joy in the Belly of a Riot accomplishes, takes trauma's inferno head on, and clears brush to the altars of soul work and self-forgiveness. Barbara Fant's urgent and essential ministry of poems reminds us joy must be a choosing. Joy In the Belly of a Riot shows us how the bruised may accept mercy, how survivors and community can enact grace." -- Brad Walrond, author of Every Where Alien

Barbara Fant's joy in the belly of a riot acknowledges that which has triggered and that which has caused trauma, and weathering, and allostatic load, and toxic stress, and microaggressions as part of the soil that feeds these poems of resilience, joy, and magic... The immediacy of these verses, of this healing as one reads or speaks the poems aloud, makes the occasion for the beauty and the blessing of joy in the belly of a riot, not now--but RIGHT NOW." -- F. Douglas Brown, author of Zero to Three (University of Georgia Press, 2014), winner of the Cave Canem Book Prize.