Camille T. Dungy

Red Hen Press, January 2010

Set in Virginia and Philadelphia during the mid-19th century, Suck on the Marrow traces the experiences of self-emancipated bondswomen, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, free people of color, and the slaves of a large plantation and small household. The interconnected narratives of six fictionalized characters use traceable dates, facts, and locations to investigate moving aspects of American history. These poems explore the interdependence between plantation life and life in Northern and Southern American cities, and the connections between the successes and struggles of a wide range of Americans, free and slave, black and white, Northern and Southern.

Awards
Winner of the 2011 American Book Award
Winner of the 2011 Northern California Book Award in Poetry
Silver Medal Winner in Poetry at the 2011 California Book Awards
2011 NAACP Image Award Nominee
Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award
Finalist in 2011 for the The Balcones Prize

Praise for the collection
Camille Dungy’s important new collection, Suck on the Marrow, explores the lives of African Americans in the 19th century, illuminating parts of slave and free black experience that are often overlooked. Plainspoken and unflinching, these poems enter the interior landscapes of the characters’ psyches to examine the nature of desire and longing and loss. With restraint and wry wit, Dungy shows us these things underscored by ownership and commodity. Foregrounding the stories of people for whom fewer records have been left, Suck on the Marrow offers us a fuller view of our collective American experience.
—Natasha Trethewey

Camille Dungy’s Suck on the Marrow exhumes a troublesome history through imagery and focuses us in the modern psyche. The metaphors are so apt and concrete that we not only witness and experience slavery within an artful frame, but also with all the nerve endings exposed. This collection embraces the act of imagining acutely, whereby imagination becomes almost an action. In fact, Suck on the Marrow plots a path back to the Southern soil, to common people, back to a double-binding pathos of pain and beauty through language.
—Yusef Komunyakaa

Available in print and e-book