Notes in the Key of Heartbreak
by Imani McGee-Stafford
What’s a poetry book review doing here? It’s not such a stretch.
Two years ago next month, I filled in my NCAA bracket, paypal’d my entry fee, and kicked back knowing the Heels would take it all and I’d be rich.
Then Sports Illustrated showed up and I knew I was screwed. Cover jinx.
Maybe you remember the buzzer beater that cost me three hundred bucks.
That was tough, but it’s not what stuck with me from SI that day. In that same issue, the one that still sits on my bookshelf, and I seriously never keep magazines, was Albert Chen’s article about a courageous, brutally honest Texas Longhorn baller who found strength and voice and healing through poetry.
Still on the bookshelf two years later. Courage defines her.
Imani McGee-Stafford was sexually abused as a child, survived through depression, suicide attempts, broken relationships, and estrangement from her mom. She came to Austin as a “walking cry for help. I was invisible.” Odd words for a woman who stands six-foot-seven. “Everyone saw me, but no one really saw me.”
What’s the connection with Playin’ In The Dirt? All those pieces of McGee-Stafford’s story just nest right into what this site is all about.
Diamonds and Dirt is a story that wraps itself around so many similar themes. Abuse, depression, abandonment, grief, anger. And a search for hope, renewal, redemption. It’s a baseball novel. Right.
In her first season in Austin, McGee-Stafford was named Big-12 Freshman of the Year. She also earned the resentment of her teammates and coaches who didn’t understand her. Didn’t see her.
Then she talked about it. She talked to the man she was dating. She talked to her teammates. Told them her secrets, the things that had dragged at her for so many years. Told them about her poetry.
Imani McGee-Stafford believes she’s saving lives by speaking out. Out loud. The first life she saved may well have been her own.
So, about this book. These poems are loud. There’s nothing discreet or hidden or foggy. They’re straight from the desperate, dark places we don’t like to talk about. But she does it anyway.
You can find the book at Amazon (paperback and Kindle) and Barnes and Noble and any other bookseller that gives a damn about saving people’s lives.
There may never be an uppity 400-level poetry class, students scratching their heads one-upping each other with deep analysis of “what did McGee-Stafford mean?”
But down the street, off campus in a coffee shop late that night, those students might just be lucky enough to hear a brave young woman at a microphone, her voice urgent, her words clear, speaking lines about what matters most. Living out loud.