The Age of Phillis
5/5
()
About this ebook
“An arresting and meticulously researched collection of poems” about the life of Phillis Wheatley, the first black woman to publish a book in America (Ms. Magazine).
In 1773, a young African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry, Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). When Wheatley’s book appeared, her words would challenge Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Her words would astound many and irritate others, but one thing was clear: This young woman was extraordinary.
Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood with her parents in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters, and her untimely death at the age of about thirty-three.
Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley's “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, was longlisted for a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.
Read more from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
The Age of Phillis Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Glory Gets Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Glory Gets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Age of Phillis
Related ebooks
Still Waters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingseveryman: a novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Born on a Tuesday: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Marrow of Tradition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Memory of Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daughter: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Send Her Back and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTea by the Sea: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Small Silent Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Passing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil: Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois; Including Essays, Spiritual Writings and Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMother Country: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5His Own Where Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Exile Blues: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAt-Risk: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stepmotherland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Our Gen: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Possessing the Secret of Joy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hue and Cry: Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Eternal Audience of One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grace: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Place of Cool Waters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Middle Daughter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scatterlings: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Prisoner's Wife Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Poetry For You
Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things We Don't Talk About Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road Not Taken and other Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Age of Phillis
11 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very creative reimagining in poetry of the life of America's first important Black poet Phillis Wheatley who lived during the Revolutionary War period of American History. The author has done a great amount of research and has a twenty page discussion of what she found at the book's end. Her poems include little known facts such a she married a free Black man and gave birth to three children who died in infancy. I teach History and really learned a lot and got a greater appreciation for this wonderful American author.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have read 9 of the 10 NBA 2020 longlisted books for poetry now--one I have been unable to get my hands on despite having 3 library cards. This is the book that should have won.This book is amazing. It is poetry, but it is also history and psychology and so many other things. Jeffers spent years and years researching the woman known as Phillis Wheatley Peters. She has read secondary work, she has read primary work, she has searched for extant letters, done census research, researched the earliest publications about her. So. Much. Work. This volume consists of Jeffers' own poems on topics in PWP's life--her capture and enslavement, childhood and religion, trips and freedom, marriage and friendships. Her writing, its publication, the people she met and knew well. She also includes poems on other African-Americans living in 18th-century New England. They were most definitely there, and I recognized many (but not all) of their names, and I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Jeffers explains her research and thought processes in prose the last section, Looking for Miss Phillis.This book did not even make the NBA shortlist, and frankly I don't get it. Perhaps they considered it too fact-based, too historical. As a historian, I loved it..