Helen Elaine Lee

“A remarkable feat of literary conjuration.” —Jennifer Haigh, nationally bestselling author of Mercy Street The acclaimed author of The Serpent’s Gift returns with this gripping and powerful novel of healing, redemption, and love, following a queer Black woman who works to stay clean, pull her life together, and heal after being released from prison. Ranita Atwater is “getting short.” She is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children. My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? As she claims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart, she is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival. Ranita is regaining her freedom, but she’s leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. Now she must steer clear of the temptations that have pulled her down, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With a fierce, smart, and sometimes funny voice, Ranita reveals how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman, even as she draws on family, memory, faith, and love in order to choose life. Perfect or fans of Jesmyn Ward and Yaa Gyasi, Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of queer Black womanhood and marginalization in America: a story of loss, healing, redemption, and strength. In lyrical and precise prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane and unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction, and of one woman’s determination to tell her story.

A Novel

Pomegranate

Lindsay

"For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn- kaleidoscopic within the crack."

makes me sadder than I could say, if saying were allowed.

I talked to myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to summon up a warrior spirit to confront the stranger who’s got a key to my future and a license to walk through my head.

Was she her own or wasn’t she? Was her body a source of life or a source of pain? Sacred or sinful? The means of sovereignty or ticket to the underworld?

This is my body. It is still here and it is still mine, and it has known worse than this, along with its portion of pleasure and kindness and love. It was mine. It is mine. It will be mine. But it is also just a body, and I can leave it and go past hurt, past feeling, past anything you can do to me in here today.

I wake up feeling shitty. Not less than yesterday, but not more either, just on a shittiness plateau.

Actions speak louder than words; that’s their credo. But I’ve always been stumped by one thing. Isn’t ‘talk’ an action word?

“You be good now. And remember, if you can’t be good, be good at it!”

Pomegranate quotes

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