The title is a play on “lust” and lustre, a type of glaze. “For me the book is about desire, and what it means to try to seize the right to make art as a young black woman,” she explains. “I had those two main poles of the book – there’s the body and then there’s art.”
I realized I need books with a personal foundation already in place: books that I already know are outstanding, that I know will transport me—books that I trust because of my long history with them. I have such books already on my shelves, but I also bought a couple more.
Where we will be in three weeks seems unknowable, let alone three months, or 12, or more. Everything is very hazy right now. Hope may not be accessible to us. But The Hard Tomorrow makes me feel understood, and it’s a reminder that even if everything is awful, much is beautiful. The world renews itself, over and over. Spring, at least, will come. We keep going.
Barack Obama in the white house was like Elvis drafted in the Army: both were vibrant men who had to operate with extreme limitations on their public selves.
Because Elvis did not want to appear to be seeking special treatment, he was deprived of the soldier’s universal right to complain — about the food, a hard-assed sergeant, a crummy work detail, anything. In A Promised Land, the first volume of Barack Obama’s projected two-volume presidential memoirs, we are reminded again and again — and not by the author, because some part of him would consider it unseemly — that the one thing the first African American president could not do was appear to be “too Black.”
Snow fallen, another going
gone, new come in, open
the door: