Hoodoo Headrag

Alden Reimonenq's Hoodoo Headrag argues for the spiritual maturation of black gay souls as they move deliberately from coffin-like closets to those without walls or doors. The speakers are closet managers who grapple variously with confinement and freedom, who share a definite ethnic voice -- a black one with strong Créole, Louisiana roots, and who investigate the places where race and sexuality blend rather than separate. In many poems, being black and gay are two strikes that make the third -- ostracism -- far too inevitable. As the speakers find their way through entanglements, they are transformed, in unfettered states, into the exemplary soul-mates of the final, long narrative poem, "A Hoodoo Love." In this poem, two male lovers purge each other of all elements that prevent their natural, spiritual loving. Focusing on the soul's progress, Reimonenq has reshaped the cultural storying of his New Orleans childhood into lyric poetry that sings through picture and sound. Hoodoo Headrag is a wish for peace for black gay men who suffer just for negotiating their love.

"In this collection of poems, Alden Reimonenq manages to capture the loneliness and wonder of childhood. And with an easy glide, he takes his readers into the remnants of the Afro-Francophone culture of rural Louisiana. There on finds worlds within worlds of mysteries and sweet and forbidden longings. I recommend Hoodoo Headrag to anyone who believes in the magic of poetry and the triumphs of African American life." --Anthony Barthelemy, Prof. of English, Univ. of Miami

"Hoodoo Headrag is a book of ambitious scope. Delving into both the personal past of his own boyhood and the collective past of the black, gay and blackgay cultural traditions, Reimonenq makes an art of remembering the unforgettable. If it is ever nostalgic, this is nostalgia with sinews. At once erotic and political, the poems involve the reader at a variety of levels, intellectual, emotional and physical. Their mood swoops from rage and grief to a soaring lyricism which lifts the reader with it. You can virtually taste the author's love of language. For all its attention to the politics of prejudice, the book's subscription to shared mythologies from Africa and the Caribbean overrides the pettiness of atrocity with broad, symbolic affirmations of life. By reflecting so intelligently on the past, it shows one aspect of the way ahead for black gay literature in America. This is an unrestrained celebration of one among many black gay lives."

--Gregory Woods, Prof. of English, Nottingham Trent Univ. Author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry; We Have a Melon; This Is No Book; A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition; and May I Say Nothing.