Award-winning poet Chet'la Sebree's essay collection, Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home is a superb, creatively structured, and often lyrical inquiry into the many facets of home. In the prologue, Sebree (Blue Opening; Field Study) asks, "But where do I--single, Black, itinerant, aspiring parent--belong?"
Each of the collection's three parts contains three essays. Part I asks "Where are you from?" and begins with an intriguingly fragmentary piece about Sebree's genealogy, depicted as a series of brief records, including entries with family trees, images, and travelogues. The last essay in this section, "On Homing," braids Sebree's many relocations with methods animals use to find their way home. Part II, which asks "Where do you call home?" includes two essays that tread ground similar to Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed. Sebree questions and confronts what it means to be a Black American and who shapes the lens of history, often by placing herself in museums and other sites of historical remembrance. In Part III, "Where do you belong?," Sebree takes readers abroad to several of the countries she's resided in, including where James Baldwin once lived in the South of France.
Throughout, Sebree ruminates adeptly on art, friendship, food, and chronic illness. In her last essay, composed of more fragments, some of which are directed at an unrealized child, she writes, "Even if people are your home, you will still need refuge." Turn (W)here is a thoughtful, penetrating meditation on how one may or may not find their place in the world. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator