The Book of Alice - by Diamond Forde (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From award-winning author Diamond Forde comes a stunningly powerful poetry collection exploring lineage and the legacy of survival as seen through the life of her grandmother Alice--a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South--using the King James Bible as a narrative framework.

"Alice / a god-song, swings still in the high / branch of our throats. I miss her, wonder / what she plants in heaven's mulch."

When her grandmother Alice died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn copy of the KJV Bible to remember her by. Borrowing forms, themes, and characters from its pages, Diamond resurrects her memory in a new sacred text: The Book of Alice. With rich, surprising language and formal dexterity, these poems retell the story of her life.

Born in rural North Carolina, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Exploring themes of oppression, liberation, and redemption, Forde draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of Alice and other Black women, so often relegated to the margins of history. These poems feature the voices of Lot's wife, Sethe from Morrison's Beloved, and even the sow from Noah's ark, and embody creative apocryphal forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures.

More than a poetry collection, The Book of Alice is a dialogue with the past, a meditation on the present, and a road map for the future. Essential reading for anyone drawn to the intersections of race, gender, history, and the unyielding power of personal stories, The Book of Alice is a heartfelt elegy and an invitation to find strength in the roots of our shared humanity.

Review Quotes

"Diamond Forde's The Book of Alice climbs back through the branches of the family tree, calling down ancestral voices to sing inside poems inspired by Biblical tradition, recipes, a census report, and other formal containers. Forde unfurls family secrets and truths across her pages, dancing past the barriers of bloodline-memory to discover what sweetness or sharpness lives on the other side. Most delightfully, Forde's dynamic language gallops through this book, irresistible to read out loud: 'batter / buttered, harpooned with jam....& I crop top, too. Coquette / my blubber, my bust.' The Book of Alice invites the reader into a kind of wonderful veneration--of the body, of the family, and of the holy self." --Maria Zoccola, author of Helen of Troy, 1993

"Calling The Book of Alice one of the best collections of the twenty-first century would be an understatement. I do not know that I have ever read a better book about grandmothers in my readerly life. Diamond Forde handles frequencies, pauses, and traditions like a conjurer of the highest rank. I'm most taken by the sound of the book. This is as ecstatic as literature gets." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

"The Book of Alice is visionary. These poems are as brilliantly made as they are soul stirring, and Forde, using style and craft, explores the past and present. She honors not only her grandmother, Miss Alice, but ours. Writing like this remind us of poetry's propensity to heal. I'm so excited for people to read these poems. They are a balm for our times." --Crystal Wilkinson, author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts

"Diamond Forde's newest poetry collection is as much a restoration as it is a reimagining, a return of Black women to our rightful place as the center of the world and of the Word. These brilliant, breathtaking poems, brimming with intimacies and interrogations, are at once familial and universal. The Book of Alice's cup runneth over with quiet devastations and resistances, across generations and time. This is a book I'll keep close to my heart." --Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

About the Author

Diamond Forde's debut collection, Mother Body, was chosen by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of the Pink Poetry Prize, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and CLA's Margaret Walker Memorial Prize, and other honors. She is a Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow whose work has appeared in Boston Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and she serves as the interviews editor for Honey Literary. Diamond holds an MFA from The University of Alabama and a PhD in creative writing with concentrations in African American poetics and fat studies from Florida State University. She is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.