RedBone Press

love conjure/blues

by Sharon Bridgforth

love conjure/blues is performance literature/a novel that is constructed for breath. love conjure/blues places the fiction-form inside a traditional Black American voice/inviting dramatic interpretation and movement within the fit of a highly literary text—filled with folktales poetry haints prophecy song and oral history.

love conjure/blues considers a range of possibilities of gender expression and sexuality within a southern/rural/ Black working class context that examines the blues as a way of life/as ritual—in concert with Ancient practices and new creations.  The past the present the future the living and the dead co-exist together/at the same time in a weave of dreams/Prayers/Love/Spirit expressed.

ISBN-10:        0-9656659-6-8
ISBN-13:        978-0-9656659-6-4
Specs:              Softcover, 89 pp.
Price:               $14.00
Pub. Date:      October 2004
Cover art:       “Conjurers” © 2004 by Daniel Alexander Jones
Cover design: E.M. Corbin

Praise for love conjure/blues

…That is to say, the pieces are poetic: architecture in language affording a contemplative space wherein we can lose and remember ourselves. They are metaphoric on one hand, use puns and wordplay on the other. The shared space for imagery is very inclusive of the audience—often visible—co-creative; not for or at an audience, but with. [Shakespeare, Kalidasa, Sophocles, Zeami, Jones, Carlos, Bridgforth.] …

—from Erik Ehn’s “Chaos, Anarchy, Ecology” keynote
address of 2007 Cohen New Works Festival

Sharon Bridgforth has developed in love conjure/blues the first effort of what will be known as the performance novel. …The act of the performance novel is a challenge of exploration in forms of American storytelling. The performance work developed over the past 20 years has not always fulfilled satisfying experiences with language. We are willing to now deepen our explorations of form. Creating vocabularies and expanding dialogues centered on diverse methods of excavating stories is the goal. How successful we are will be defined by those of us making the journey… This primary work [love conjure/blues] has given permission to many of the rest of us to move forward.

—Laurie Carlos, The Austin Chronicle, Sept 16, 2005

“More than a novel, not entirely a stage performance, soulful prose infused with impassioned poetry, best read aloud or at least whispered in the mind—love conjure/blues is a challenge to read, but with infinite rewards. Among them is the essential message that, central to survival in a black working-class world, there must be the acceptance of love in all its varieties: “they made poetry one syllable at a time/they conjured themselves/love.” In telling her story—of pretty girls and butch bulldykes, sissy boys and strong gay men, sassy cross-dressers and assorted other benders of gender—Bridgforth braids the spirited gusto of gospel, the soaring notes of the spiritual, and the bawdiness of the blues. The result is a jazzy fusion of literary text, musical emotion, and oral storytelling, simmering with the crushing history of a racist culture and the defiant, quietly proud lives of Southern blacks and queers. It’s not as immediately accessible as her previous work, the bull-jean stories—but it is equally lyrical, often as funny, and much more intense an experience.”

—Richard Labonte, Book Marks column, Dec 6, 2004

“With love conjure/blues, poet Sharon Bridgforth has gifted us with a soulful melody of words in the blues folk tradition. Harnessing the magic of her critically acclaimed the bull-jean stories (1998), she re-creates with seductive earthiness both the rural South of the twenties and thirties and the citified legacies of Bessie Smith and her queer house-party “buffet flats.” Bridgforth’s historically imagined juke joint community—populated by “the mens the womens the both and the neither”—restores queer agency to black history in the tradition of Audre Lorde, Bruce Nugent, and James Baldwin. This poetry is not just a blues, but a sort of divine witchcraft, a stomp circle, a shout! Not jubilee, but hallelujah.”