This

How do we narrate ourselves and others? What are we compelled to leave out? Therí Alyce Pickens’s debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. This collection mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil’ Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.