On Brenda Marie Osbey, “whom [we] have every right to love”

Abstract

This article reviews the recent edited collection Summoning Our Saints: The Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey, edited by John Wharton Lowe (2019), arguing with reference to the indispensable pieces contained in that text that Brenda Marie Osbey's oeuvre and especially her History and Other Poems (2012) merits significantly greater attention than it has thus far received. It proposes reasons for that scholarly neglect, highlighting ways that institutional preferences in black poetic criticism tend to disfavor Osbey's aesthetic choices. Ultimately, it frames Osbey as a contemporary griot whose poetic speaker and formal devices differ substantially from those deployed by living black poets, like Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey, who have garnered greater scholarly attention.