Abstract
Holler if You Need Me is a collection of poems about a Southern woman's early life across location and time, centering hunger, heritage, and bugs—their complexity and self-containment. As these poems contend with the glory and glut of Southern cooking, language, and music, they are infused with threads of religious trauma, violence, mental illness, and searching. This collection is an elegy for my still-living parents, the people they were while they raised us, and it is about the paradox and courage of healing. As poet and activist Audre Lorde writes in her 1985 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “…there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out.” Through various lenses and forms, these poems try to lay bare the speaker’s recursive experience of reconciling her split selves, finding herself in the storytelling of her traditions, and asking: What do I choose to hold onto, and what am I hungry for?