April 1, 2022
The queer, Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a Black Southern American Baptist man, Geter is a distinguished poet whose debut collection, Un-American, was an NAACP Image Award winner and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Here, she can be expected to use the ringingly lucid, nail-sharp language evident in her poems as she blends memoir and Afrofuturist thought to trace her journey through an unwelcoming United States even as she turns to art, music, and love to survive and thrive.
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September 1, 2022
What does it mean to be a Black, queer, non-able-bodied daughter of an immigrant in America? Poet Geter explores all the ins and outs, highs and many lows of grappling with her personhood in the land of the free. Born in Nigeria to a Muslim Nigerian mother and an African American father, Geter grows up in the U.S. in a household rich with culture and love. But after her mom dies when Geter is just 19, the intensity of grappling with grief in a country that rages against every part of her identity is the catalyst that drives the author to address how the narrative of white supremacy has influenced what she believes about who she is. Dismantling that narrative is the beginning of her self-discovery. In a book that is both an incredibly intimate memoir and a thoroughly researched commentary on race and identity, Geter explores the ways racial inequality has permeated every aspect of her life and illuminates the beautiful legacy of Black identity in spite of racism and skewed histories.
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October 3, 2022
Nigerian American poet Geter (Un-American) deconstructs in these evocative reflections her personal narrative and examines its connection to her parents’ histories and the catastrophes that compound her own losses. Growing up in Akron, Ohio, as the daughter of a Nigerian Muslim mother and a Black Southern father, Geter felt like “the water between two land masses.” After her mother died of a stroke when Geter was 19 and shortly thereafter her father became a diabetic, Geter, who dealt with chronic pain and anxiety, was ashamed of her own self-perceived weaknesses. “There was something about illness that felt dangerous even beyond the fact of the illness itself,” she writes. She also considers how the physical and psychological violence of white supremacy causes complex trauma, which is an “invisible disability.” As an adult, Geter studied art to reimagine her life and identity as a queer Black woman, consulting works from great artists—including Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings—and her father’s charcoal drawings to heal. The narrative doesn’t follow a neat timeline of events, but Geter’s expansive vision becomes much more than a self-portrait as it confronts how the human body keeps score—and survives. This poetic memoir delivers. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Ayesha Pande Literary.
Starred review from August 15, 2022
In this elegiac text, a Nigerian American poet pays homage to her family while considering Black origin stories. "I'd been living inside the story begotten by white America," writes Geter, "but I'd been born into something else--what was it?" She names this the Black Period, in which "we were the default." Born in Nigeria, the author grew up in Ohio and South Carolina. Having parents who "centered Blackness and art," she explains, "meant my sister and I were reared in a world that reflected our image--a world where Blackness was a world of possibility." Geter grapples with chronic pain and history ("that thing that white people had gotten to write, but we had to live") and culture in the U.S., "where I had so much in common with the enemy's face America painted--African/Black, queer, a woman, child of a Muslim mother." The author compares herself to Atlas, the Greek Titan condemned to support the whole sky: "My body holding up the burden of a country made of myth and lies." She qualifies the Black Period created by her parents as "one where, if not our bodies, then our minds could be free." Organized by theme, the narrative meanders yet remains fiery. In details, the author's poetic sensibilities dazzle: "My father thinks I am innately lucky. Even in our grieving, he's believed me to be a queen in the land of the damned, a winning lottery ticket in a field of beggars." Of a dream about her mother, who died suddenly when Geter was 19, she writes, "Black folks, we be. We be the whole verb of the wor(l)d." The book contains two inserts and 50 pages of monochromatic portraits by her father, artist Tyrone Geter. These add another dimension of humanity as well as demonstrate her father's profound influence on her life. A resonant collage of memories, soulfulness, and elective, electrifying solidarity.
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