This Past Was Waiting for Me: A Chronicle at Quarter Century is an exploration into the events and ideas–displacement, occupation, revolution, resilience, and revelation–that shaped and continue to shape our world. Its author, Sarah Trembath, revisits histories in the tradition of Woodson, Harding, Wilkerson, and Zinn, but she does so with the heart of an artist. Each essay in this truth-telling effort is written in excerpted letter form, and enhanced with visual art and poetics. The collection is, at once, varied and unified, unselfflin and comforting, echoing all that we know about our race-class hierarchies and suggesting means of transcendence.
Emotionally, politically, culturally, and stylistically, this book builds momentum from the Foreword, and never fails to engage, to the Afterword. It gave me the feeling I had the first time I read books like Neale’s Visions of a Liberated Future or Bambara’s The Black Woman anthology or Harding’s There is a River or June Jordan’s On Call or Sonia Sanchez’s Homegirls and Hand-grenades, and I left those books like, “Let’s go get free!” This Past is one of them clarion-call joints.
– Kenneth Carroll, poet and Past President of the African-American Writers’ Guild
Sarah Trembath is a woman on fire. A vigorous, sprawling intellect. A passion for justice. An unflinching commitment to truth. These are the characteristics of Trembath and her groundbreaking book. Part manifesto. Part treatise. Part autopsy of our not dead past and our living, breathing present. This Past Was Waiting for Me is a brilliant, angy, hopeful, healing book written by a writer who believes fiercely in the human potential for humanity.
– Marita Golden, Author of How to Become a Black Writer: Creating & Honoring Black Stories That Matter, A Woman’s Place, and Saving Our Sons
To purchase, please visit the Lazuli Literary Group site.
From It Was the Scarlet that Did It, “Naadira”:
The rose that
gets left behind
Death and treachery:
Gloved fingers
never love the petal, never
know the thorn or
the sword/the solution
salvation/the hatred
the sweet separation
of self that goes down
when a cut thing
is submerged and
left to tread
water.
Singly one stretches
stem-like and skeletal.
Debutante ready and
prepped for the snap
and the plunk. (the sub-
mergence of eventual
endless spectation.
© 2019 by Sarah Trembath, Moonstone Press.
Photo by Jessica Scott.
Rich with song and history, Trembath’s poems lace together the past and present. There is pain in [her] lines, but it is not the despairing kind. The women [she portrays] are bound by circumstance, not defeated by it. I find myself strengthened by her words.
– Dolen Perkins Valdez, Author of Happy Land, Take My Hand, Balm, and Wench
Sarah Trembath pivots the tragedy of the beautiful with the blues of the everyday. Her work will trouble the water of the reader. Life is not without blues, it seems to say, but then again, the blues are not without clarity that makes them shine.
– Yao Glover, author of Inheritance and coauthor of Crazy as Hell
Sarah Trembath is a master of sound and cadence, forging words that bear witness—and call us to bear witness—to the power of language, offering “blessed / bone / redemption”: solace for a suffering world.
– Hollynd Karapetkova, author of Dear Empire and Words We Might One Day Say
To purchase It Was the Scarlet that Did It, please email sankofaloveproject@gmail.com.