Even though this is a book of memoir and a book of imagination, she doesn't romanticize the past.

She examines it with care.

Yeah.

In that examination, she reveals the returning to one's origin as an act of returning to self.

So it also feels like while she's unearthing all of these small little trivial things that we just write off as, you was born on Christmas.

Like all those moments, she's like, let's think about this in this way.

And she just turns it a little bit.

So that romanticism, it's dying on the vine.

It really is.

Yeah.

She's trying to give us a different bounty of fruit.

Okay. trying to give us a different bounty of fruit. Welcome to the Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them.

I'm your host, Tracy Thomas, and today is the Stacks Book Club Day.

We are joined by Mahogany L. Brown to discuss our April book club pick in honor of National

Poetry Month. The book is Room Swept Home by Ramika Bingham Risher. This is the 2025 Los Angeles

Book Prize winning poetry collection that explores the themes of race, maternal lineage, faith,

and mental health through the lens of Ramika's own family history.

Today, Mo and I talk all about these poems. We talk about what they mean. We talk about how and why

Ramika would want to tell the story in this way. We talk about the archive, the lineage of poetry.

We get into it all. And be sure you stay tuned till the end of today's episode to find out

what our May book club pick will be. Everything we talk about on each episode of the Stacks is linked

in our show notes. If you want more bookish community, more hot takes and content from me,

...