Sign-In
Cart
All Of Me: Light Work, Heavy History
Paperback
Publisher Price: $18.99
Publisher: Emily Clarida
Published: Mar 15 2026
Pages: 142
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
All of Me: Light Work, Heavy History is a contemporary African American poetry collection that engages cultural heritage, intergenerational memory, and the enduring presence of history within personal identity.
Through reflective and lyrically grounded verse, Emily Clarida examines the emotional inheritance carried across Black American lineage. These poems honor generations shaped by survival, labor, migration, faith, silence, and resilience-illuminating the unseen histories that live within families and communities. Rooted in ancestral remembrance and familial narrative, the collection explores how history is not confined to textbooks or archives but carried in voice, body, ritual, and memory.
Clarida situates intimate testimony within broader historical and cultural contexts, examining the complexities of legacy, belonging, and inherited strength. The work reflects on the labor of women whose stories were preserved orally rather than institutionally recorded, the generational impact of systemic inequities, and the sacred act of documenting what might otherwise be forgotten. In doing so, Light Work, Heavy History participates in the tradition of African American literary poetry that bridges personal reflection and collective memory.
The collection addresses themes of cultural preservation, historical consciousness, generational resilience, and identity formation. Each poem functions simultaneously as creative expression and cultural record-an offering that acknowledges both the beauty and burden embedded in inherited experience. By confronting silence and honoring lineage, Clarida affirms remembrance as a form of agency and literary reclamation.
Contributing to contemporary conversations in African American literature, cultural studies, and heritage-based storytelling, this collection will resonate with readers of Black historical narratives, lineage-centered writing, and poetry that foregrounds community memory. Suitable for academic libraries, book clubs, literary collections, and readers seeking historically grounded and culturally reflective work, Light Work, Heavy History offers a sustained meditation on the responsibility and power of carrying history forward.
More than a poetry collection, it is an intentional act of preservation-an acknowledgment that light work often emerges from heavy history, and that memory itself is both inheritance and possibility.
Also from
Clarida, Emily
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Lao Tzu
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover