Room Swept Home

Intimate and sweeping poetry that examines race and lineage. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2025)

Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"--postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery--nine days after birthing her first child. Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living?

Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian poet. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Writer's Chronicle, New Letters, Callaloo, and Essence, among other journals. She is the author of three volumes of her own poetry: Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award; and Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, with her husband and children.

• Publisher: ‎Wesleyan University Press (February 6, 2024)
• Language: ‎English
• Hardcover: ‎140 pages
• EAN/UPC: ‎9780819500984
• Dimensions: ‎10.3 X 7.3 X 0.4 inches | 1.17 pounds
• BISAC Categories: Poetry