Peculiar Heritage is an exquisite poetry compendium that navigates the acclivities and declivities of personal and historical reflection. With fastidiousness and tremendous wit, Bellinger situates the “I” within a legacy of protest and Black liberation, braiding myriad thematic and stylistic strands. For instance, the emotional motor and rhythmic innovation of “Sowing Season”—“My mother’s fingers recall / lineage of designs / cross continents / cross ideas / crossing corn rows / th-rip th-rip th-rip / plaiting Africa into my hair”—complement the elevated lyricism of works such as “There Was Such a Glory: An Ode to Harriet Tubman.”

Associative affinities of this ilk are crucial to the cumulative success of the collection. Each poem holds its own center of gravity and the runway required for soaring, but the book is crafted with such micro- and macro-level awareness, the poems speak to each other—and the reader—in a unique constellatory language.

Fluid yet dialectically alert, Peculiar Heritage also explores ritual. In “Nasty Girls Pantoum,” a clever deployment of the form in which a rhyme scheme is created by interleaved repeated lines, the reader is given access to the speaker’s interiority and process: “I’ve cleaned / I’ve clipped / I washed.” The reclamation of the adjective “nasty” charges the currents of resiliency and surprise within formal expectations.

Throughout the book, a metanarrative simmers: there’s a ravenous need to know; to feel; to listen; to be vulnerable enough to love; to scrutinize patterns; and, ultimately, to forge (rather than find) a path to being “awake and aware,” despite the vicissitudes of racism, sexism, and capitalism. The section entitled Lunar Journey englobes 11 confident poems within Part 1, signaling a structural change that embodies the emotional distance traveled by Black women.

Similarly, “Tituba,” a powerful persona poem, illustrates the rich complexity of agency:

I tell them because I want to be free, if they want me
No more with the family, no more in Salem, no more coldness
I'll tell them a story.

“Tituba” also weaves a thematic double plot in which intra- and intertextual cross-pollination illuminates piercing insights on race, gender, class, and power found in such poems as “A Genesis,” “Morning Pledge,” and “Windsor Knot.” In “The Black Woman Talks about Lakes,” Bellinger meditates on the relationship between nature and segregation, reckoning with displacement and longing: “I’ve grown to miss Lake Michigan / And I hate it.”

Capacious yet rooted in the key tenets of stanzaic compression and the lyric impulse, Bellinger’s Peculiar Heritage offers an essential cartography of racial consciousness and human resilience. Against the pall of white supremacy and its cascade of violence, DeMisty D. Bellinger’s poems blaze with light. Peculiar Heritage unlocks the generative power of inquiry and enduring resonance of a life astutely observed. Each verse is an ember, a spark that lets us see more closely, feel more deeply.