REMICA BINGHAM-RISHER (Norfolk, VA) is director of quality enhancement plan initiatives at Old Dominion University. Her books include Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up, and What We Ask of Flesh and Starlight & Error.

"Remica Bingham-Risher fully embodies the role of 'poet as historian'...[She] has swept us all away to a new place, a home that is a blank slate. When you turn the final pages, there is sweetness. The extensive after materials read like a celebration. The acknowledgments; the detailed notes section for dozens of poems; and the selected bibliography are a complete, bustling gathering of all the people, art, and scholarship that has touched Bingham-Risher on this journey."--Sara Everett, Diode

"You won't leave Room Swept Home without some joyful-noise-making, some weeping, some humming, some wild pride. I leave soothed and startled into recognition. I leave proclaiming my honest-to-God name. Remica Bingham-Risher ushers in the voices of all my kin. Her grandmothers are my own, are yours, are ours."--Courtney Faye Taylor, author of Concentrate

"From the footnotes of history, Remica Bingham-Risher's poems skillfully call forth the ancestors whose blood fills her heart and fuels her poetic mind. Room Swept Home reminds us that our trauma is not the beginning or the end of our story."--Amanda Johnston, 2024 Texas Poet Laureate

"In Remica Bingham-Risher's fearlessly imagined Room Swept Home, the author's paternal great-great-great grandmother and maternal grandmother cross paths. What is made from their proximity is not pure myth, but proof that 'every house with heat got a woman's hand in it.' Room Swept Home is a house with heat, and Remica Bingham-Risher is the woman whose meticulous hand made it so."--Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure

"Opening with artfully constructed and impeccably researched Historical Poems before weaving her way to self, Remica Bingham-Risher's brilliant and tender Room Swept Home unfractures histories quilted across more than a century, offering answers to 'Questions That Still Need Answering, ' about enslavement, Catching Babies, Red Summer, Manic Depressive Psychosis, James Brown's gold casket, and more. Made all the more cinematic with poignant black and white photos and taking poets to school with an expert execution of poetic forms...readers will be grateful this poet has always found it difficult to hold her tongue."--Frank X. Walker, author of Affrilachia

"Remica Bingham-Risher's Room Swept Home is a stunner. In these pages blood is time, time is history and, in this poet's knowing, deft hands a music rises from the ashes, from the bones, from the black women voices fathomed deep within her. She is their witness, their reclaimed testimony, their singing proof. Tell it right, Remica Bingham-Risher's grandmother tells the poet. She does. And how."--Cornelius Eady, John C. Hodges Chair, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Co-founder, The Cave Canem Foundation

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Pub date: 2025-08-26

Length: 140 pages