Part Savvy Lit Crit, part Blues chart, part hip revenge-femme-lyric, part imagined Interracial Romance Saga disguised as poems, In Lucy Negro, Redux: The Bard, a Book, and a Ballet, poet Caroline Randall Williams plays the literary Race Card and cuts the whole deck, moving backwards in time in and forward in mind, archeologically offering a precise and seductive command performance of the hidden temperament of a specific and beautiful “Dark Lady” “both used and loved. Williams unearths Lucy by working her own mojo of intelligent vengeance and a dual aesthetic of inquiry and minimal, tour de force exegesis. Travel with Williams through the sublime racial moments of famous sonnets to a cultural critique of the work of Mr. Whiteness Him Bad Bard Self, William Shakespeare. Lucy as radical muse. Lucy as newly-freed verse news. Move over Othello, no more easy getting’ovah, Lucy Negro aka Black Luce has, double-brilliantly and double inventively, fully arrived on fire! To add more heat, Williams’ book has been adapted to the ballet stage by Nashville Ballet’s Artistic Director, Paul Vasterling.
