Blueprint for Leaving a Black Man

I’m a new pair of eyes every time I am born. — Tina Turner

Ike hit Tina, and then she hit him solo. Debut:

the brink of a platform boot in the backseat

of a limo scene. Ms. Turner left that black man;

her name and Autumn weave split, You know you love him,

but can’t understand why he treats you like he do when he’s such a good man.

1984: Tina, can’t stand the rain … against her window

brings back sweet memories/ Oh, pain, don’t you remember?

The a cappella arabesque of a “Proud Mary,” so low

Buddhist rosaries confessed a Hail Mary of catcalls

caused by her fishnet’s duet with a denim mini?

Let’s skirt:

Ike called back. Sometime after midnight, he wanted

to re-rehearse stage positions again. He agreed

that he looked great right there next to Tina holding

his bass guitar & afro pick, then shouted, “You better be good to me!”

My husband, too, held a six-shooter to my head.

I negotiated what love’s got to do with staying,

our asleep children, nestled like toes

in peek-a-boo stilettos & that scratched

vinyl of night looped I’m a soul survivor

the night I became queen.

In Blood Vinyls, Southern vernacular gives Yolanda Franklin what poetry must give to the ear. This book is all sass and riot … which is to say that Franklin is unashamed by the fact of sorrow, an emotion that reminds us just how vulnerable we really are. This book calls and coos and confesses, or as Franklin herself says, “i know i know i know you still believe that i deserve this soundtrack i live but didn’t i didn’t i make you the most beautiful consequences of love?”

— Jericho Brown, The New Testament

Yolanda J. Franklin writes poems marked by vitality and wonder, urgency and care. Like the best kind of album, Blood Vinyls demonstrates Franklin’s formal and vocal range. Even when she writes into hurt and despair, the expansiveness I find here fills me with joy. I am grateful for this book.

— Camille T. Dungy, Trophic Cascade

“Black people love hip-hop!” says Yolanda Franklin in the first line of the first poem in this excitable, over-caffeinated book. Blood Vinyls is jam-packed with “grown-up shit,” as another poem says, and grown-up people (Tina Turner, Big Mama Thornton, Toni Morrison) as well as people who never got a chance to grow up (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown). Roller-coastering from high to low, love to hate, silly to serious and back again, Blood Vinyls speaks with an authority seldom heard in poetry’s low-key, non-fat, chilled-out, too-laid-back-for-its-own-good atmosphere. Too many hyphens? Get used to it, reader, because this poet demolishes all the categories and makes new and better ones from the fragments of the old. You’ll love Yolanda Franklin, guaranteed.

— David Kirby, A Wilderness of Monkeys