I Am Still Your Negro

"I Am Still Your Negro takes no prisoners. With sheer brilliance, Valerie Mason-John creates poems that burn Babylon and Rome; bring you to tears; make you shout hallelujah. Her voice is that of the lamenting mother, vengeful goddess, triumphant warrior, compassionate lover, a cool ruler with a pure heart. I am left with only one conclusion about this book: it is a tour de force." -- Afua Cooper is Halifax's Poet Laureate, a global Dub poet, and Black Studies professor at Dalhousie University
"I Am Still Your Negro hauls us all up by the collar to face our shared complicity. A lot of damage has been inflicted through racism, sexism, greed. Mason-John opens some wounds in the hope of healing them." -- Alice Major, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene
"[T]he wide range of Mason-John’s vision ... traverses history, geography, and culture.... [Her poetry] is significant for its reappraisal of our collective past, which so often overlooks or writes over marginalized voices and experiences. [Mason-John is] explicit in calling out a hypocritical Canadian multiculturalism that pays lip service to inclusion while simultaneously entrenching systemic biases and processes that maintain a racist and exclusionary status quo." [Full review at https://quillandquire.com/review/the-response-of-weeds-a-misplacement-of-black-poetry-on-the-prairies/ ] -- Steven W. Beattie * Quill & Quire *
"This poetry collection grabs you... Readers are confronted with the violence of the Black experience, from the haunting spectre of slavery to the current and ongoing terrorizing of the Black diaspora at the hands of the police. All of the messy, the painful, the enraging -- what we’re conditioned to believe as shameful -- is laid bare for the readers and brought to the fore. Many of these accounts traverse various places -- whether in the U.K., the U.S., or Canada -- and the bluntness and force of her words arrest you." [Full article at https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/book-review-i-am-still-your-negro-by-valerie-mason-john] -- Junie Desil
Included on CBC Books's list of top Canadian poetry of the year in December 2020.
“The topics range from slavery and colonization to global politics and historical realities, addressing the racialized and gendered intersections of African identity, diaspora, and ancestry…. Mason-John’s poetry sheds light on these harsh realities through personal and vulnerable narratives. Their writing also offers hope for our futures by reminding readers of our collective reservoir of power, resilience, and creativity. With these tools in our hands and our ancestors beside us, we may still be negros, but we ain’t silent about it no more.” [Full article at https://arrow-journal.org/language-and-personal-narrative-in-revolutionary-poetry/] -- shah noor hussein * The Arrow *