NEW hardcover

Tale of a SkyBlue Dress Moss, Thylias

Within my lifes present unified theory of being, splendor divests itself of its own integrity, splitting to belong to everything that notices it, each part as effective as the whole splendid thing It belongs to whatever wants it and is inexhaustible even as someone lays dying, even as someone else cries thinking there is none, their tears becoming prisms With these words, the acclaimed poet Thylias Moss proclaims a hymn to the power of light over darkness, both in her own life, and in the wider world In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honorsincluding a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Writing Awarddelivers a brilliant, passionate, and utterly moving memoirIt is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in skyblue dress Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from infliction pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendril further into her lifeYet ultimately, TALE OF A SKYBLUE DRESS is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness It is about refusing to accept tyranny It is about feasting on splendor How can there not be pain in a world spinning madly, in the lovely calculable chaos ? asks Thylias But, she says, I am saying that joy is too necessary to abandon