A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris B. Hill’s new book of poetry and commentary on African American women’s incarceration from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland, is a masterwork, a tour-de-force of writing and reflection, monumental in its scope and seriousness. It is the living testament to the lives of black women so often devalued by a particular set of intersecting oppressions that produce a quotidian feeling of imprisonment that binds them concomitantly with a set of lengthy, weighty historical bindings: gender, race, slavery, expectation, Jane Crow, and mental slavery.
We introduced the work of Hill, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Kentucky, a year and a half ago as she prepared the manuscript. That article—on digital poetics—discussed the mixed media of what she called a “digital remix poem.” The piece examined, “Shut Up In My Bones (For Harriet Beecher Spruill-Hill),” combined a recorded reading with haunting Sarah Vaughan performance and other sonics, evoking Toni Morrison’s rememory as aesthetic and philosophical practice.
Now, the multiple modes move onto the page, with portraits of black women—some the literal subjects of the poems, others appropriately, analogous anyones—are encircled by knotted rope. Bound. Binding here is the central metaphor, from literal incarceration to less obvious (but equally fraught) forms of attachments…to nation, family, the literary tradition, and those who came before.
“Shut Up In My Bones” opens A Bound Woman, telling the story of Hill’s maternal grandmother, bound by a nation built on denying her freedoms she deserved, keeping her bound. For Hill, reflecting backwards is itself part of liberatory daily rituals of resistance. The women whose tradition into which she places herself—Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Eartha Kitt, Sonia Sanchez, Grace Jones—were, in Hill’s words “bound to the ways they write, mark, or set boundaries to draw a line in the sand.”
There’s a moment midway through the book and midway through “Black Bird Medley,” a multi-part poem for one of the criminalized women discussed in Kali Nicole Gross’s Colored Amazons, where music enters, not as soundtrack but as something sadder. “silence./no song.,” Hill writes. Later, she calls #SandySpeaks, the hashtag Sandra Bland used to curate and document her own protests of police killings before her own tragic and unsolved passing, “a choral refrain,” echoed as a round that reverberated across the digital space.
The inextricability of gender and carceral trauma is a key theme echoing through the pages of A Bound Woman, with many of the subjects of Gross’s work receiving poems alongside figures like Joan Little, for whom Sweet Honey in the Rock composed a song in 1976 after she was found not guilty of the first-degree murder charge she faced after defending herself from her rapist, Clarence Alligood. That shared understanding of resistance—the particular knowing articulated by black women scholars and activists—runs deeply through this book, making it as much about the binding strength in numbers as it is about the many difficulties and dishonors it chronicles.
“What is so threatening about a Black woman bound to her own freedom, one who is also committed to the liberation of others?” Hill asks poignantly in discussing a section on Assata Shakur, though this question is an appropriate through-line for the entire book.
There is so much here—Hill’s meditations on her service in the Air Force and its macabre intersection with a State that disproportionately threatens her black male son, Hill’s own family history, “bound in a legacy of love” that renders the networked, everyday interconnectedness of black womanhood to the very bedrock of society, of life, and of nation. “If you had heard her/chanting as she ironed/you would understand form and line/and discipline and order and/America,” Lucille Clifton wrote in 1999. That poem, “Study the Masters,” is a rallying call for Hill. And with this book, she’s on her way to becoming one herself.
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