The Lost Songs of Nina Simone

Overview

Nina Simone's ghost lives in these poems by award-winning author, Shonda Buchanan. Like the icon's life and art, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is complex, daring, sensuous, hard and soft all at once.

Reviews

"Shonda Buchanan crystalizes her as a rare amalgam: piano prodigy, sudden soul singer, freedom fighter, half-loved-lover, complex mother... The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is a history of us as well as a potent re-telling of an extraordinary life." —Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up and Room Swept Home 
 
"Like the fine poet she is, Buchanan captures Simone’s essence in wild, surprising metaphors that soar with insight... Buchanan more than meets the challenge of trying to capture the force of nature that was Nina Simone." —Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy and The Luck of the Fall
  
"Simone was known to put a spell on you. Now here comes Shonda Buchanan with poems that knits a scarf around the singer’s moods and spirit... This book is a meditation on her life; a Black woman poet’s detective work." —E. Ethelbert Miller, Writer and literary activist
 
"Buchanan places the reader in the 'Crushed rooms, cindered evenings' of Simone’s life, and never lets us forget the legacy of slavery and racism that shaped the artist, the woman, and her possibilities."  —Terry Wolverton, author, Embers, a novel in poems

"In The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, poet Shonda Buchanan captures the legendary artist in sharp, kaleidoscopic detail, highlighting Simone’s highs and lows, triumphs and tribulations, complications and contradictions. The result is expansive and deep." —Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Fat Time and Other Stories and Song of the Shank
 
“Buchanan gives us stories that sing poetic counterpoint as we experience Nina Simone’s metamorphosis, ancestry, and legacy. She expertly plays us like a virtuoso conductor draws out the inner voices of a symphony so we hear the complexities... ” —Jen Cheng, Poet Laureate of West Hollywood (2023-26)
 
"What a delight to have one of my favorite writers and singers brought together in this gorgeous collection. Shonda Buchanan shines a bright light on the amazing Nina Simone, giving us a vivid picture of her life through poetry.. It takes a bold and courageous talent like Buchanan to take on this project which is a sensory and riveting journey. Her words sing: they have to in order to truly bring Nina Simone alive in Buchanan’s stunning, must-have collection." —Carla Sameth, former Poet Laureate of Altadena; author of One Day on the Gold Line
 
"This collection of poems is steeped in a brew of molasses-thick imagery, haunting like a minor chord yet nurturing like the resonance in Nina Simone’s voice. This book will have you “pulling your woman self together at the seams.” —Camari Carter Hawkins, author of Death by Comb, founder of Mama’s Kitchen Press
 
"We think we know Nina Simone and then we read Shonda Buchanan’s brilliant, carefully researched poems. Here are the lost songs of Nina as a girl and the songs of the women in her family. Here is Buchanan’s vision of how music entered Nina and changed the whole world." —Renee Sims, author of Meet Behind Mars

A journey through a magical, imaginative language of a Nina Simone portrayed among her family, immersed in a centric nature. Buchanan’s magical, political realism bridges all Simone’s life to its ends in revolution, disappointment, exile. Simone’s encounters with an array of characters and themes — that include oak trees, willow reeds, Indian cedar trees, church mice, a treasure map, hematite stones, and hanging pearls — all of which lead her inevitably to revolution, exile, and disappointment, Buchanan creates an unforgettable portrait of the amazing historical singer, Nina Simone.
Shonda Buchanan’s poetry book, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone bridges the gap between the magical, the realistic, and the political. As one journies through this collection of poems, one suspects Buchanan’s links to Simone in a history to confirm Simone’s African, Irish, Indian heritage. These elements combine to create an unforgettable portrait of the amazing historical singer, Nina Simone! Bravo Shonda Buchanan!
In The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, the reader is invited to embark on a journey through poems of a fantastical and imaginative linguistic landscape, where Nina Simone’s childhood is portrayed against the backdrop of a nature-centric, magical realist narrative. The book culminates in a realistic and politically charged conclusion, all intertwined in histories of Africa, Ireland, and North America.
Each poem can be seen as a musical heartbeat, each beat serving to ensure to keep Nina Simone’s memory alive. The mother, grandmothers, and sisters who surrounded her in nature, continue to live on through these heartbeats. In her poetry, Shonda has created a unique and compelling narrative of Nina Simone and her world. The exploration of the bond between the poet and the singer Nina Simon adds depth and complexity to this imaginative landscape. Despite the challenges and losses Nina Simone experienced, such a life serves as a beacon of hope and resilience.
—Carolina Rivera Escamilla, author of In a Corner of Your Country
 
"The Lost Songs of Nina Simone by Shonda Buchanan is a triumphant journey into the life of Nina Simone. Through lyrical storytelling and extensive research, Buchanan awakens Simone’s complex identity as a prodigious artist and a fierce Civil Rights activist. Her poems reimagine Simone’s musical and personal journey, exploring the depths of her struggles and the profound impact she had on Black women, artistry, and the global fight for justice. The result is a deeply moving homage to a woman whose voice and spirit continue to resonate within all of us." —Alene Terzian-Zeitounian, author of Deep as City’s Ache

No reader of the Shonda Buchanan (Black, Indian, European) Black Indian memoir could be surprised she wrote The Lost Songs of Nina Simone: Poems (Black, Indian, Irish). Their wandering makes them kin.  Many vivid lines in Buchanan’s poems bring Simone’s songs alive. They both display a strong sense of place but often feel trapped, driven to move beyond their origins to pursue their art. “I could become someone else,” the poet says for the singer in “Metamorphosis”: “Call myself another name?”
We follow Simone, the preacher’s daughter, from Tryon, North Carolina. She becomes the river flowing one day, a hurricane the next, to an Atlantic boardwalk where she lives from seven to midnight, “dies come dawn.” Music is her love, her passion, but not Bach. No longer Eunice, Nina pounds piano keys till her knuckles crack and throat aches. Fever follows whiskey and gin. She recalls watching her shattered father “scratch their names on the sides of silent oak trees,” seeing cotton fields, a river of memory. “There are years when whole notes are all she eats, beyond tired, her neck thin as a chicken bone, body slender as a Nile reed.” She sees Black bodies in trees, remembers dirt-floor shacks, outhouses, eating vinegar pie for dinner.
Nina comes into a difficult marriage with Andy. “Even doped up I could play until dawn, in nightclubs,” she says, gives birth to a baby girl, Lisa. She loves to drive around New York showing everybody “what a dark-skinned woman in America can do. I’d fly into the music!” “Mama, look at me now,” she thinks. Civil rights are not civil,” she proclaims, seeing “black blood pouring over the land.” She goes to Africa, to Liberia, thirsty to be touched, feels betrayed by an America that left her broke, wants to “eat its racist heart out.” When she returns, she tries to start over again, performs at festivals. After her funeral in France, her ashes are, at her request, scattered over Africa, her ancestral home. Brava, Shonda Buchanan.
—Norbert Krapf, author of Ida Hagan of the Pinkston Freedom Settlement

Author Biography

For the last 25 years, award-winning author Shonda Buchanan (Black Indian, Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country, Who's Afraid of Black Indians?) has been on the hunt for Nina Simone and the impact of the icon's life, work and artistry on the world. This search has culminated in The Lost Songs of Nina Simone. The poems collected in the book are a case of inquiry into Simone's Civil Rights work, her personal and professional struggles and sacrifices, as well as the world's adoration, condemnation and worship. For more information, visit http://www.shondabuchanan.com and @shondabuchanan.