Piece De Way Home: New and Selected Poems - Tapa blanda

Piece De Way Home is an experience reported in verse of growing up, living in, leaving, and returning to the South. Dudley Randall, the poet’s first publisher, and early publisher of the new Black poetry in the 60s, described this poetry as “pedestrian” and yes it strolls at a leisurely pace, but it also looks deep with insight into the experience of growing up Black and female in the rural south mid-century, and of migrating to and from the urban experience of Detroit and the North during the height of the new cultural-awareness-years of the 60s and 70s. The poet’s sojourn would be incomplete without the finishing influence and report of the return to and route back to the “roots” of the rural south, in the 80s and 90s, from whence the experiential trek back home began. Piece De Way Home is poetry which accomplishes its goal of “examined and insightful memory”.

Frenchy J. Hodges was born October 18, 1940 in the rural Georgia American town of Dublin, county of Laurens, in a community heavily populated by African Americans, the Buckeye Community. Love of the written and spoken word was begun early and influenced by a school-teacher mom who actively enjoyed vocabulary games and dramatic interpretation of popular poetry and rhymes throughout the poet’s impressionable years. Hodges began writing poetry at the early age of 11 penning the lost but remembered story-poem: “Daddy Was Mean to Animals” describing a frustrated farmer-father’s treatment of the occasional recalcitrant mule or milk cow. A first publication of Hodges’ poetry was the Broadside Press publication of the chapbook Black Wisdom in 1970. Other limited-run self-publications include: Piece De Way Home, 1975; For My Guy, Love Poems, 1975; The Man of the House Is Not At Home, 1986; and Nightlines, 2006. In 2003, Hodges returned to the place of her beginning, Dublin, GA, after having retired from 25 hands-on years as a language arts teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. In 2008, she co-founded, with Yvonne Lamb-Castillo (also a returning Dublin native) Legacy Readers Theatre, which presents culture-bearing activities that tell our unique African American story through spoken word, indigenous music and song, and interpretive dance.