Me, No You

Diamond Forde’s poetry communes with her grandmother Alice’s interior universe, reflecting ‘a dance between two bodies, alive together despite a generation between them.’

By Nic CavellJanuary 31, 2026

• Poetry

DIAMOND FORDE’S dynamic new poetry collection, The Book of Alice, begins with an invocation to her “multiverse sisters,” imagined versions of herself who died at each juncture where her life had been threatened. She writes of one sister’s death by drowning:

        Like anyone with an imagination, I grieve
        the infinite        me, a multiverse
        of self thrust through space dust,

        & I’ve survived

        one drowning—lifted from the deep
        by strange hands, sopping
        air into my water-wrung lungs

        while a different Diamond
        in a different time
        kept sinking—

Other sisters are left behind “through three car wrecks, two surgeries, & my own hand / capped on an oversized bottle of pain / meds.” The “Diamond” who is speaking in this opening poem would at first glance seem to be the sole survivor amid all this destruction. Yet she identifies the survivor’s shifting sense of self:

                        me—   no, you—   a fantasy far
        & hip-deep in daffodils, sunlight dribbling
        down our chin

Here, even in her separation of herself from the imagined sisters, the “me” is not just the speaker but also “you”; the reader is invited to survive too. In the same poem, the speaker expresses the desire to “die / the way Grandma died: stroked out,” so that she might do the work of poetry, “to pry these dream songs / from the honeysuckle sky.” The reader, of course, encounters these words after Forde has completed the task of binding her soul to family lore, especially the life story of her grandmother, Alice, which sings from the marginalia she left in a copy of the King James Bible that Forde inherited. As the amanuensis of her family, Forde’s act of creation must end in her self-effacement.

In the meantime, the speaker discovers herself in part by imagining Alice’s story into being. Four of the collection’s five sections are titled after books of the Bible—“Genesis,” “Exodus,” “Lamentations,” “Revelations.” In red ink, Forde includes in her book the words that Alice had written inside her copy of the Bible. Similar to the formatting of the holy text, poems such as “Creation Myth: Alice” also feature numbered verses: in that poem’s third verse, Forde vividly describes Alice as a girl in the Carolina cotton fields, “dodg[ing] the nipping stalks, her dress / fanning like the unbroken wings of a sandhill crane,” with “her dark / hair lagooning till, fed up, she wrapped the flooding coils into / a basket around her arm.” In the sixth verse, red ink appears where she quotes from Alice’s marginalia for the first time: “The first man to ask me to marry him, I will.” This decision launches the saga that will take Alice from North Carolina to New York and back to the South, while raising a family in between.

Tracking Alice, the speaker also enters into textual conversations with the work of writers including Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Terrance Hayes. Forde imagines Sethe, the protagonist of Morrison’s Beloved (1987), in conversation with the biblical figure Hagar, an Egyptian slave and wife of Abraham whose destiny conflicts with that of his first wife, Sarah, as each woman is promised to give birth to a great nation. Hagar is only mentioned in two chapters of Genesis, but she casts a long shadow: she is twice sent with her son to her apparent doom in the desert (both times, God saves them). Hagar is also the only character in the Hebrew Bible to name God—El Roi (“the God who sees”). In the poem “Sethe Speaks to Hagar,” Diamond shifts focus from Alice and her story to inhabiting the voice of Sethe, addressing Hagar in a prefiguration of young women’s suffering on their journey to adulthood:

        only a monster could look
        us in our dream-doped eyes to tell us
        one day, our mornings would be animal work,
        the kind that scoops ya spine like a gray mule

The next stanza echoes Walker’s The Color Purple (1982): “How many stars did you count / through the net of your Mr’s hands before you stopped / believin’ in the places he couldn’t reach?” “Mr” echoes Walker’s formatting, and the characterization of him in this poem is familiar from Walker’s work. Following this allusion, Forde returns to Morrison by way of Hagar. After her first tour of the wilderness, Hagar obeys God’s instructions to return, for her child’s benefit, and submit to Sarah, who had become jealous, and Abraham, who had sent her to her death. In the final stanza of Forde’s poem, the persona, Sethe, avers, “[O]f course, [Hagar] came back  […] Cuz we women now. / Every time we bleed, it’s for somebody we love.” The line is grim yet resonant: women bear the entire weight of those they hold dear—as demonstrated by the marginalized figures in Forde’s poems.

It is fitting that the next poem is titled “Womaning,” a text recovered verbatim from the margins of Alice’s Bible:

        LOVE, GOD say, is obedience, so I obey
        the alarm of sun sung through my window,
        climb down cold steps to hymn & hem, to cook,
        clatter, & kid myself into believing these tasks
        don’t hook familiar shackles, & when my man
        kiss me in the soft spot below my ear, I dream
        he really want me, but that’s what’s wrong
        with womanin’, we stay spinning yarn
        from the colorful crochet of our minds, but few
        admire it—

In the spinning of yarn, as in Forde’s spinning of Alice’s story, we recognize both the raveling of a woman’s formidable imagination and the world’s unappreciation of that imagination. “[W]hy,” the speaker asks, “did you make me / in your image if you wanted me to kneel?” The poem ends with a tiny blade of grass pushing up through the ground in the architrave of the cathedral: “Let me break the rules one time,” Alice insists, emerging from the trap of womanhood she has depicted, walking “like I got somewhere, everywhere, to go.”

From religious doctrine to recipes with ingredients and instructions, traditional “women’s work” is, through form, repurposed in Forde’s collection as a site of resistance. The most compelling recipe poem is “Candied Yams: or What to Do When Another Man Hits You,” which calls for “4 swole sweet potatoes” and “1 smashed orange (just the juice),” among other listed ingredients. The reader is directed to “roast” the sweet potatoes “till honeyed spit dribbles / down the face of it,” then “splatter the soft guts / into a pot, just hot.” She is told to “stir” with butter, sugar, and spices “until the spoon smacks like a backhand—his cracked knuckles crashing.” The speaker toggles between reflection on a poisoned love affair and a determination to enfold felt violence into the language of a recipe:

        & while it roils inside you—the love

        you have for him still—scrape
        the sugar from the spoon, note
        how much it tastes like resentment—
        the sweet seething your heat has made.

Here, Forde captures the troubling ambiguity of love and rage toward an abusive partner. The speaker uses the language of cooking to permit the intensity of her own internal state: “Let it stew. Let it smolder. / Let the copper pot burn.”

The Book of Alice is a love story, ultimately, between a girl becoming a woman and her grandmother looking back on her earlier life. Perhaps the strongest poem in Alice is “Ars Poetica with Snow Globes,” in which the speaker imagines an idyllic landscape within a snow globe, “the evergreens, sliced like perfect limes, lean / against the hill’s snowy crescendo.” A dog chases the “sleepwalker,” who is trudging through the snow, reaching, “arms outstretched,” for “the wiry bridge of Grandma’s / hands.” While the family attends to the grandmother’s deathbed until her last breath, the speaker divulges that she was watching Will & Grace: specifically, the episode in which Jack (Sean Hayes) loves a Barbie doll that looks like Cher but fails to recognize the real Cher when she is “right in front of him.” Forde’s interpretation of the episode is devastating yet also inspiring: “I understood Jack then, / because this is how I learned to love, too, / doggedly chasing my fakes.”

Even in her last moments, Grandma Alice is seen by the speaker as “posed like a perfect doll / in my brain’s pink playhouse.” Seeking her out in the traces Alice has left behind and her “imprint” on the speaker’s world, Forde’s poems envelop her in a new life. Yet Alice remains only on the cusp of the real. In poetry, Forde writes, “I’m still chasing shadows.”

Forde’s final poem, “Dance with Me, Alice,” offers a note of thanks:

                        What’s a dance if not gratitude
                between two bodies. Grandma, I’ve lived
        because of you. I’ve survived as the star

        dazzling like a diamond at your earlobe, so

                let’s bop.

The possible selves rendered extinct and extinguished in the opening poem thereby dissolve, by the collection’s end, into a dance between two bodies, alive together despite a generation between them. As Forde references the diamond of her own name, Alice’s shadows become the glimmer of the poet’s existence. The collection not only preserves her grandmother’s legacy but also embodies it—the poet is her legacy.