Furia

Using a productive deployment of the double elegy, poets Lucille Clifton and June Jordan carve out a space of maternal retrieval to negotiate the loss of their creative yet stifled mothers. In doing so, both writers engender fury as a mechanism of propelled delineation, allowing them to explore the contours of their own artistic ambition, using their mothers as focal points. Embedded in this retrieval is the acknowledgment of suppressed agony both writers recognize as belonging to their mothers. “Furia” positions this acknowledgment at the center of the framework of literary production for Clifton and Jordan, as part of the way they privilege the creative world their mothers produced for them.