STARLIGHT & ERROR by Remica Bingham-Risher

Remica Bingham-Risher, a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet, is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013). She is currently the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. 

There’s starlight and sunlight—and no error I could find—in this elegant book where the soul shines through every line. Only when we see how richly the poems matter to the poet can they come so close to us—entering with inescapable feeling and authenticity. We believe, and live, what each poem says, because the heart knows truthful detail. Central to our humanistic beliefs are the love of daughter, wife, stepmother, lover. Here, we learn this all over again, and how complex problems like memory become strengths. Only perfect craft can make it all happen, with experience leading the way. Remica Bingham-Risher has written a world class book of poems. It’s the best of the best in American poetry. This is no imitation. This is the real thing. 

—Grace Cavalieri, Producer/Host “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” 

 

In Starlight & Error, Remica Bingham-Risher redefines the beat of the heart not only in the adult situations of romantic love but also in the adult decisions within the love of family. The scope of her vision helps us see into our own lives with a sharper focus. At a time in America when we need hope the most, this book offers us an open path; we no longer “wonder what other secrets/ we’ve been keeping/ on this side of the world.” Here—in her songs of forgetfulness and of memory, songs of the closed fist and the open palm, songs of regrets and of gratitude—we clearly see a world worth fighting for. 

—A. Van Jordan 

 

How do we save what’s coming? The love between two people, cut through by error and time, often marks the path for those who follow. In Starlight & Error, the legacies of love between aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, children and their children’s children is re-told through the lens of imagined memory. In the difficult landscape of the present, is black love revolutionary? Are faith and forgiveness? Here, the history of love—fraught with fear and light, war and hunger, distance and gravity—is always asking: how do we transcend the mistakes of those who made us? Can music save us? Can the stars?

 

Reviews

 

• "A Review of Starlight & Error by Remica Bingham-Risher." Lisa Grgas. The Literary Review

 

Features

 

• "Poem: We See 'The Lion King' on Broadway, I Enter the Pride." The New York Times Magazine. ed. Rita Dove. 7 December 2018.

 

• "The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Starlight & Error by Remica Bingham-Risher." The Sundress Blog: The Wardrobe. ed. Natalie Giarratano. 7 - 11 May 2018.

 

• "Delicious, New Edition, 1986." Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

 

• "If It's Magic." Verse Daily. 13 September 2017.

 

• "Love in Stereo." Split this Rock. 5 July 2017.

 

Interviews

 

• "5x5: Poets in Conversation." Diode Poetry Journal, Vol. 11.1

 

Awards & Nominations

 

• 2018 Library of Virginia Annual Literary Award Poetry Finalist