Damaris has escaped her father's drunken abuse, but can't seem to escape her loneliness. Is her biblical name hold the key to her future?

A young girl decides that she will no longer tolerate the abuse of her alcoholic father.

She was almost fifteen on the night she dared for the first time to thinkof what life might be like away from home. She must escape carefully, shemust get away. She learns to come to terms with the past, live inthe present, and trust the future to another Father.

Nominated for an NAACP Image Award A Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title for the season Booklist's Top 10 Diverse Nonfiction titles for the year BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections" Most Anticipated Books of the Year--The Rumpus, Nylon A revelatory work in the tradition of Claudia Rankine's Citizen, DaMaris Hill's searing and powerful narrative-in-verse bears witness to American women of color burdened by incarceration. “It is costly to stay free and appear / sane.” From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes, illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout. For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era's prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social, intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and lethal. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, Hill presents bitter, unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet unbridled African-American women. Hill's passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their load and light, binding history, author, and reader in an essential legacy of struggle. *The Sentencing Project

She was almost fifteen on the night she dared for the first time to thinkof what life might be like away from home. She must escape carefully, shemust get away. She learns to come to terms with the past, live inthe present, and trust the future to another Father.

Well-known and loved storyteller Janet Oke presents a beautifully told tale in her best tradition. With both anticipation and anxiety, Donnigan, a man surviving on the Western frontier alone, and Kathleen, a young girl thousands of miles away with limited prospects of finding a husband and stirrings of adventure in her heart, are at last united to begin their lives together.