Praise

“Veronica: A Suite In X Parts is a tale of every Veronica every femme trying to live despite the chronicle of a death foretold and the gratuitous violence of everyday life. It is a beautiful movement, a lamentation, a chorale, an algorithm, and V and X of it attending to and rewriting the mathematics of black social life. The mother mourning, the girl slain, the unloved woman, the captive maternal, the stone who wants to dance, the girl done wrong too many times are some of V’s many faces. This suite of poems takes the breath away, demands that you bow your head and get ready for the storm.”

—Saidiya Hartman

“Retooling social invisibility as psychological necessity, Erica (Hunt) slips into Veronica who, nonetheless, retains or regains her separate agency as an alter ego. Between an ambiguous, perhaps ambivalent, acknowledgement—’We were out of science—’ and reengagement—’we exchanged our hands over our hearts / hers for mine and mine for hers,’ there is arrested conflict: ‘…Veronica claimed / my pockets spawn zeroes and / we were ready to turn on / each other the fire hose of free floating ire/ but for this—’ (14). Accusing each other, woman vs. woman, they are each prepared to assume the martial stance of the state, to weaponize the ‘fire hose’ of anger untethered from any ground, that is, from any specific body.”

—Tyrone Williams, Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review