Customer Reviews

The River Is Rising

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I love this book of poetry. Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is one who is truly African and American, unlike many who have been assigned the name in reparation for a history ancestors experienced. I feel that I can say this, since I am African-American, or, as Du Bois puts it, "I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil" (The Souls of Black Folk, from "The Forethought"). Dr. Wesley's poetry speaks of a different veil, the veil of assumptions. Many assume what Africa is like, but Dr. Wesley has actually experienced first-hand a taste of Africa, and she shares her poetic meals with her family of readers, meals served with American appetizers and desserts. Her poetry is able to reflect the true realities of a portion of Africa as well as some of the realities of a portion of America. She voices her 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' very poetically. She writes of Pittsburgh and Michigan as well as of Liberia, and her experiences tempt this reader. Dr. Wesley offers in this book of poetry tidbits of death, of birth, and of life, all with that special second sight that she has.
I agree with the blurb on the back of the book: "One senses in her that rare combination of someone who has been deeply schooled in both literature and life, and who has integrated those two into a deeply felt and shrewd worldview." For example, in the moving poem, "Memories," Dr. Wesley relays the experience of another "foreigner" arriving in America: "She's talking of years ago when she, / arriving in America, like me, one bundle of clothing,/ her breath of air and hoping like me, just for one more day." The persona goes on to say, poignantly, "and then I come to stand here and laugh here, / and cry here about my own war, clinging to my own past and a war still being fought at home." Dr. Wesley's poetry draws from that controversial term, universal, that term Stephen Henderson calls a "cop out." Sometimes in life, however, we need to cop out. It is what keeps us sane sometimes, for we do often experience the same stuff sometimes. Thus, in this beautiful collection of poetry, Dr. Wesley invites us to laugh and cry with her and, thus, to cling to one more bit of our seemingly ephemeral sanity. Poetry does that for us sometimes. As Emily Dickinson wrote: MUCH madness is divinest sense/ To a discerning eye;/ Much sense the starkest madness./ `T is the majority." The poet is definitely not part of "the majority," at least not the good poets. Dr. Wesley is one of the good poets. In Toni Morrison's novels, the seemingly insane are the ones with all the knowledge, and these seemingly insane usually are African ancestors. Here's to our living African ancestor, who writes of her experiences, in Africa as well as in America, hoping to bring knowledge to her future, to her children as well as to other heirs of her art. In Dr. Wesley's poem, "Coming Home: For Besie-Nyesuah," the persona states the following in reference to the experience of coming to America: ". . .in the Diaspora. In America, we are the new nomads,/ the wanderers coming home or looking to make/ home or running away from home among new people,/ and, one by one, our children, who will never know/ where we really come from, are leaving only to come/ back to decorative lights/ Christmas trees, holiday/ music, and turkey baking in the oven, stuffing,/ and pies. We are becoming new people, I tell myself." In THE RIVER IS RISING, Dr. Wesley invites us all to become "new people," learning from ourselves as well as from others. This book is perfect for the holidays. It is quite timely and would make a great Christmas gift or any gift during this increasingly commercialized season. This book makes us want "to sit a while and think," as Lorraine Hansberry's African character, Asagai, advises in the play, A RAISIN IN THE SUN. "Never be afraid to sit a while and think." Buy the book; it will make you think.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's "The River is Rising" is a unique, fascinating, and brutally honest book of poetry. It tells the story of a brave woman overcoming the harshness that life has thrown at her and surviving the Liberian civil war. The interweaving of the stories of her life in Liberia and of her life in America is brilliant. Her voice is startlingly real (you can tell that she's speaking straight from her heart) and even with the sadness of the poems themselves, she injects a wry humor into her writing that is refreshing. I was lucky enough to hear Patrica read at the book launch for this book in Pittsburgh. Her voice is exactly the way it comes across in the book: strong and wise, with soft humor and a gripping intensity. It's been a couple of weeks now, but I can still hear her as she read the title poem, "The River is Rising." It's hard to find a book today that makes you sit back and think about what it's trying to tell you, but I think that this is one of those rare books that will force you to feel everything the author is feeling and cause you to really stop and think about life.

This is a very mature, strong, full, vulnerable book. Like the river in its title, there is a certain ebb and flow between each poem in these pages. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, unlike many other bi-coastal writers, has discovered, finally, a voice that blends the Liberian repettion and musicality to the Midwestern (and now, Northeast) flat hills and flattened accents. Her stories are troubling--wars that are personal and contentious; issues of raising children in a space not her own, yet completely her own; finding new ways to negotiate the spaces she finds herself paddling in; a now adult daughter, emboldened by her college-freedom; coming to terms with the loss of her mother. These are the troubled waters of content in Jabbeh Wesley's new collection, but there is language here and tone that are adept at saying precisely what lies at the river's shallow edges and deep ends. Jabbeh Wesley has stories to tell & languages & music & precision to tell them.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's The River is Rising is a hope-filled discourse about survival, growth, and perseverance. Using plain, often colloquial diction to express feminist concerns, Wesley delivers an honest and inspiring treatise of her experiences as a survivor of the Liberian civil war. Her poetry taps into the void born of terrible loss, and her writing challenges that void, confronting both the need to fill that hollow place with language and the compelling necessity to move on.

-Kayla Gatalica