Mama Phife Represents

A Memoir

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Haymarket Books

Published:19th Jan '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Mama Phife Represents cover

Galley mailing to reps, bookstores, media, and available on request National TV, radio, and print campaign, including interviews, features, and reviews Review copies and pitches to major dailies like New York Times, Chicago Tribune, etc. as well as online, Black interest, and poetry and hip-hop outlets like Poetry Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Root, Afropunk, Artforum, The Rumpus, Teen Vogue, Buzzfeed, The Fader, and many others. Major launch events in Chicago, and New York City, and east coast bookstore tour Advertising in Poets and Writers, Poetry, as well as online at LitHub Publicity and promotion in conjunction with author’s events Promotion through social media: Haymarket Books has 74k Twitter followers and 55k Facebook fans Promotion through the network of BreakBeat Poets authors, supporters, and readers, as well as on the series website www.breakbeatpoets.com

Award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection.Mama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body’s lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.

“I am eternally hopeful that more people in the world come to terms with understanding that for anyone to share an experience of grief is a true generosity. With Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor allows a reader to bask in the generosity. The sharing of loss and grief is the building of a bridge that others who have experienced that specific loss can cross. This is a book about losing a child, yes. But beyond that, it is a book of tactile emotions, and a singularly musical writing, which Boyce-Taylor has always done so well. Above all, Mama Phife Represents shows anyone who has lost someone how to make the most of memory, and the most of their own survival.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest   “‘All around are unhinged bones / wailing at the lip of sea.’ And: ‘I’ve stitched your breath / to my throat.’ Such lines carry the loss of the writer's beautiful son out of which emerges this book of love, of joy, of grief, but also of plenty. Through poems, letters, photographs, and other communications, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has gathered an exquisite record of this Great love between mother and son, artist and artist. Quietly I say to you here: It is like nothing else I have quite read. An elegy, an epic, a duet. A motherhand gathering the lastings. We are so utterly fortunate to witness this immense devotion, and in that witnessing be changed by yet another glimpse of deepest love and what it makes possible.” —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria   “Mama Phife Represents is an intimate and heartbreaking tribute to Boyce-Taylor’s son, Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor. Not only does Boyce-Taylor deftly humanize the hip-hop superhero, but she also logs every fragile emotion in both eulogy and celebration: so much so that ‘she will travel to Anguilla/ beg Yemaya to bring him back.’ The light that the poet finds on this journey is nearly unfathomable, but always redemptive. This collection is a monument, and I am grateful for it.” —Michael Cirelli, CEO of Urban Word National Youth Poet Laureate Program   “Mama Phife Represents is at once a memoir and a living archive of one man's extraordinary life and his mother's love and pain in the face of his loss. At a time in the United States when so many black mothers are losing their black children — through illness and violence — this book stands as a testament to the deep, ground-shifting impact of that loss across generations. Honest, Healing, Timely.” —Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, poet, novelist, and scholar

ISBN: 9781642594041

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

80 pages