STAND IN MY WINDOW

A meditation on the messy intricacies and enduring comforts of home.

Yvette’s relationship to the construction of “home” is colored by both her childhood and her motherhood, by her art, her race, and a series of influences she has absorbed in multiple spheres and spaces. This collection transmits the weights of these forces, turning a penetrating eye toward everything from clotheslines and desks to divorce and eviction proceedings. Yvette sketches her personal narrative, including a youth marked with housing uncertainty and instability, her experience as a single mother during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, and her being forced to vacate her home in 2021. She shades in these contours with the richness of both personal reflection and the wisdom, creativity, and scholarship of Black elders like James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, framing chapters with photographs of her Brooklyn apartment and the Hudson Valley home—Mae House—that she purchased to provide an affordable retreat for Black families. The range and dimensions of the author’s subjects and sources compile and overlap, building the vision of home as a place for looking both inward and outward, to the past and to the future. With a keen eye and lyrical empathy, the author attends to the possibilities and limitations of the physical outlines and objects of home, while recognizing the people who mourn, bond, collaborate, and celebrate within it. As she sifts through the violations of police shootings, sexual assault, flooding and fires, and the march of unfair housing practices, land theft, and gentrification, Yvette demonstrates that, for Black women in particular, home—its sheen, its allure, its security, or its remaking—cannot be separated from its entanglement with attacks upon and within it, the labor it extracts, or notions of ownership.

A poetically reverent inspection of safety, embodiment, and inheritance through the lens of inhabiting space.