Spoken Words Love and Lockdown Raw Uncompromised Spoken Word Collection Kindle Edition

Love and Lockdown A Collection of Spoken Word Poetry Jerome RichmondSome books are written. This one was survived.Love and Lockdown is a spoken word poetry collection two decades in the making — poems born in the quiet back rows of Milwaukee's legendary Mecca open mic, sharpened over years, then met by a new wave of work written alone in empty parks during the COVID-19 pandemic while the world held its breath.Jerome Richmond is a watcher. In these pages he watches a city grieve, watches ancestors rise from ancient soil, watches love arrive and wreck everything beautifully, watches a community consume itself — and refuses to look away from any of it.The collection moves in four books. I Am A Watcher bears witness to the pandemic — the ventilators, the silence, the vigils. We Are Ancient reaches back to Egypt, Nubia, and the African kingdoms that existed before the world decided what "human" meant. Love & Heartbreak Coming Back for Your Mouth falls hard into desire and the damage it leaves. The Sellout does not flinch from the ways we sometimes destroy ourselves. The collection closes with The Ancient Hunger — a supernatural prose poem that asks what feeds on a people's pain, and has been feeding for centuries.Richmond's voice carries the DNA of the griot tradition — part testimony, part warning, part praise song. These poems are meant to be read aloud. Let them live in your mouth.A lantern for the grief you haven't named yet. Read more