Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience - with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood. This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge - of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world. The central poem, 'Eighteen', chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault. In it the speaker is reborn from the shadow of the experience as a 'miracle scream' and a 'dark voice', and vows to 'learn the language that will allow [her] to summon [her] own angels'. By the poem 'Thirty', the speaker understands 'maybe older and wiser is just learning/ how to put yourself in your own good hands'. The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time - they look back into the speaker's past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward.
The many elegies in the collection consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem 'How It Touches Us' comes to realise, 'all laws of matter must hold true'. The poems are a movement through fracture - both necessary and unwarranted - toward wholeness and transformation.
Author Biography:
Lauren K. Alleyne was born and raised in the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. In 1997, she left home to attend St. Francis College in New York, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. In 2002, she graduated with a Masters degree in English with a specialization in Creative Writing from Iowa State University, and in January of 2006, was awarded the Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing (Poetry) and a Graduate Certificate in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University. She is currently the Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dubuque, in Dubuque, IA. Prizes: Small Axe Literary Award, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenburg prizes, the Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, The Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize at Cornell, an International Publication Prize from The Atlanta Review. Anthologies: The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine Editions, 2007), From the Heart of Brooklyn Vol. 2 (Vivisphere Publications, 2006), Gathering Ground (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Growing Up Girl (GirlChild Press, 2006), From the Heart of Brooklyn (Vivisphere Publications, 2003) Journals: Atlanta Review, Banyan Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Black Arts Quarterly, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Kennesaw Review, The Caribbean Writer, Women's Studies Quarterly and many more
