Bettina Judd

Aug 15, 2024 | logicmag.io | Bettina Judd |Rezina Habtemariam

Gynecology was built on the backs of Black women, anyway.1patient., written by Bettina Judd, is a visceral collection of poems elucidating the history of medical experimentation on Black women that produced gynecology and its technologies. Meditating on the women rendered property through slavery, Judd sharply attends to the violence that structured their lives. patient. interrogates the legacy of J. Marion Sims, a nineteenth-century medical doctor who is widely regarded as the father of gynecology.

Jul 15, 2024 | beta.poetryfoundation.org | Bettina Judd

i You can abstract anything if  your psyche needs it. Anything can be turned into a past to forget— embittering thoughts that need exorcising. When you read the words of your relative who had been enslaved, the New Black starts to act real old, don’it? Starts to gnaw at that happy you sang about, Pharrell. Ain’t it a thing to think—Black art in the hands of  the woman or the man that beat your ancestor near to death?

Feb 17, 2023 | poets.org | Remica Bingham-Risher |Bettina Judd |Kaveh Akbar |Omotara James

Mess like this sullies everything:             my grandmother will call and say Who’s that white lady             on your answering machine? She will laugh and I will wonder what’s missing?             (What did I forget? What does it mean             to lose your mother? Am I brilliant yet?) Pretty-mouthed girl with perfect diction.             How my teachers praised me. Didn’t they love             my lost convention, were they equipped to raise me?