Name: Ellie 's review of Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee
Item: Pomegranate
Rating: 5
Author: Ellie

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

Stas

But she heard her mother's voice in the back door alcove, at the table, in the basement. And now she would never please her. Never tell her what she was keeping inside. Never love her more than she feared her.

Lindsay

Here I am, alive and awake. Still going forward and backward. And brave enough to tell about it.

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

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 are here,” he says. “You are yours.”

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

Here I am, handling my business. Dealing with the past and present. And believing in the future, at least some of the time.

I don’t want to have to tell him what to do. I don’t want to explain that, for the both of us, this was about loneliness, scratching an itch, curiosity, or taking a worn path, and that instead of pretending, we should let it be. I don’t want to explain where all I’ve been. And I don’t have it in me to make my story feel alright to him. He’s one person I don’t owe an explanation or apology.

Seems like his imagination isn’t big enough to include what he might accomplish with his mouth besides talking.

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.

Clumsy, stammering, I tell how I’ve worked on taking inventory, and on making amends, on the Eighth and Ninth Steps. And how now that I’m out and trying to earn back the right to mother, I need to keep on owning the ways I’ve messed up. How in the past, when I woke up to how low I’d sunk, I had to use again to unsee it, and I’m afraid that given the chance, a part of me will always choose numbness.

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?

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.

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

Black folks, we’re still obsessed with eyes and skin color and hair, and all my life people have either praised my eyes or decided I think I’m the shit for having them. Whatever. It’s not like I went to Walmart and picked them out. We all know what they come from: Ownership. Possession. Rape. Anyway, I hope Amara uses hers for seeing.

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

Charlotte Labelle &
Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee

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Charlotte Labelle &Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee

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Charlotte Labelle &
Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee