Lions Don't Eat Us: Poems

Bridges' heartfelt, though often overly sentimental debut, which won the 2005 Cave Canem prize for a first book by an African American poet, gathers, retells, and weaves into its capacious, accessible verse six generations of the author's family. Bridges follows her progenitors from slave life in antebellum Virginia and Cherokee hardships on the Trail of Tears, through the Great Migration of African-Americans to industrial cities (in this case, Detroit), back to a Virginia ""red/ with southern dirt,"" and finally to Washington, D.C. Folkways, foodways, family sayings, heroic legends, and long-lasting gossip all make their way through the book-length sequence. Light-skinned Grandma Ellen was expelled from her plantation for speaking against chattel slavery; Uncle ""Cockarouse Charlie, important/ man, wise Virginia man"" won renown as a ladies' man. Though much of Bridges' writing builds on the family stories her mother retold, she also describes her own upbringing: ""Daddy, you reminded us the cost/ of dreams, purchased by your depression paychecks."" The book's final section follows the poet's own trip to West Africa, where she visits-among other sites-""Île de Goree/ where slave houses/ called castles, cling like sores/ on the body of Mother Africa."" Despite its historic horrors, Bridges works to keep her collection optimistic; her clear free verse pays homage to the mothers and fathers whose strength made her life possible, and to the traditions-African, African-American and Cherokee-which those ancestors represent.