Special Edition :: We are Primary Colors :: Marcy Rae Henry

/

An Excerpt

     Brown, adjective: ‘a color as of dark wood or rich soil.’

         When the summer fell from the sky above Puerto Rico

houses splintered into wood crumbled into dark soil

            and dogs on Playa Lucia were carried away by floods.

                         In India an ark floated away with a flood

                      carrying not animals but books.

                                              Seven still sit in the Big Dipper.

America ignored dogs splinters floods tears

              the people who’ve had citizenship for over a hundred years.

-from “Primary Colors”

THE MANUSCRIPT

To celebrate this, Marcy Rae Henry’s first chapbook, we are releasing We Are Primary Colors both in the Bound Together series and as a solo publication!

We Are Primary Colors gathers urgent poems of political activism and solidarity, of travel, of lockdown, of selves present and selves left behind. Formally exuberant and communally engaged, Henry’s writing captures a seeking, restless intelligence that builds meaning by weaving between continents and between languages. Braiding memory with astute perception, these interlingual poems capture the anxieties and the beauties of twenty-first-century global citizenship.

THE AUTHOR

Marcy Rae Henry is una Latina/e de Los Borderlands and a multidisciplinary artist. Her writing has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination and first prize in Suburbia’s 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest. Her work will be included in the Best New Poets of 2023 anthology. Other writing and visual art appear in The Worcester Review, Mud Season Review, PANK, The Southern Review, Thimble Magazine and The Brooklyn Review, among others. M.R. Henry is an associate editor for RHINO and an associate professor of English and creative writing at Wilbur Wright College. For more than twenty years she has curated and co-curated poetic events for the City Colleges of Chicago and Chicagoland communities, including readings and performances for Red Rover Series and 100,000 Poets for Change. Though she is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts, she can be found at marcyraehenry.com and Poets&Writers. 

To order copies of this book outside the US and its territories, please email us at doublecrosspress@gmail.com for international shipping costs.