Grocery Shopping with My Mother

Description

When Kevin Powell’s elderly mother became ill, he began returning home each week to take her grocery shopping in Jersey City—walking behind her as her voice, stories, and language reshaped his understanding of love, memory, and survival. From those visits grew a collection of poems that reads like an album: thirty-two newly written pieces, plus bonus “tracks” that celebrate wordplay and devotion. With roots in the literary traditions of Ntozake Shange and Allen Ginsberg, Powell traces generational wounds and the quiet ways oppression travels through families, while insisting on the possibility of forgiveness, abundance, and healing. Shifting in form—from praise chants to reverential meditations—these poems offer an intimate, culturally grounded portrait of lineage and contemporary life, guided by a spirit of innovative hope.

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