How Swallowtails Became Dragons

How Swallowtails Become Dragons by Bianca Spriggs

Accents Publishing

Winged Series

• Paperback: 24 pages
• Publisher: Accents Publishing
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1936628015
• ISBN-13: 978-1936628018

How Swallowtails Become Dragons is one of the Accents Publishing Winged Series, featuring entries from the 2010 poetry chapbook competition. Pushcart Prize winner and National Book Award Finalist Patricia Smith calls Bianca's work "an aggressive signature that is deftly crafted, insightful and often achingly lyrical." Having lived most of her life in Kentucky, Bianca s poems reflect the trials and triumphs of growing up as a woman of color in a border state.

Bianca Spriggs has proved to be a major activest for Affrilchian poetry. She is a force of nature, carefully finding just the right words to talk to the heart.

Black Market reflects on one of America’s weakness from the past – slavery:

When I was sold this time
My new Massa don’t check to see
How many teeth been rotted out my mouth
This powerful poem sheds a new meaning on the debate of who is human and who is not. We are all human beings, cut from the same cloth, with the only difference being our color. I love my country, but it does make me sick to my stomach thing about the way slaves were treated. I feel ashamed at the atrocities slaves endured at their master’s hand.

In Werewolf, you can literally see the changing from man to beast:

At the climax of a lunar cycle
A poem stirs,
Dark tempest in my chest …
… It cracks my rips to get out

I can smell the blood, I can hear the creature devouring its pry, and see the teeth. The moon is high in the sky and the lunar cycle brings on a different kind of terror.

In the poem After Loving a Pretty Man, the line, “I’m not so easy to exchange for another,” lets the reader know a man must be cheating; but now she’s on her own two feet and won’t go down easily.

This collection of poems is brutally honest, shining the light on subjects most people we are not ready to admit to.

Bianca is an Affrilachian poet and a Cave Canem Fellow. She is a freelance instructor of composition, literature and creative writing. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.