But as the second half of the collection’s title suggests, black women may be the “mules uh de world,” yet they are also heirs to a special joy — the insight, love, and self-replenishing pleasure Janie finds under Granny’s “blossoming pear tree.” An exquisitely quiet joy undergirds Mule & Pear’s movement through literary history. Loss may weight the mule’s lids, Griffiths reminds, but pain can sprout blossoms in the blink of an eye. So insists the speaker of “Leg Done Gone,” an imaginative ventriloquization of Morrison’s infanticidal mother character Eva Peace. For her, the people, thoughts, and feelings black women kill to survive are never really absent. Instead, they find themselves “all here in my universe. / They tell me things / about the past & future / when I think God’s gone / in the present. Tell me / to come home to them. Come home / & love us, they say.” And as the speaker of “Risa Takes a Look & Gives it Back,” (inspired by Wilson’s subversively self-mutilating Risa in Two Trains Running) puts it, “meanness in this earth / is as pleasurable as beauty.” Making sure to bring the paradox home, Griffiths’ Eva demands, “you listening to me, girl?” calling the reader to join in her universe of voice and vision, in which joy and tragedy, love and violence, are two lights cast on a single slice of living.

These moments of sight packed into sound are not interruptions in Mule & Pear — they stud Griffiths’ poetics like seeds, reminding the reader of the smoothness and the bite of the stories her women tell.

Griffiths herself is no stranger to the travails and triumphs of the black girl alighted on words. Her first two collections, Miracle Arrhythmia (2010) and The Requited Distance (2011) show the impressive range of her imagination, which spans artistic genre and media. Also a photographer and painter, her close attention to light and visual contour explains the unusual eyes of some of her speakers. The speaker of “Ester Courts King Barlo,” for example, declares: “I see how color beats me, / stole the gloss from beauty.” And the speaker of “Dear Celie” confesses to Walker’s protagonist her wish “…to see / a smile knock / at each door / in your mouth.”

These moments of sight packed into sound are not interruptions in Mule & Pear — they stud Griffiths’ poetics like seeds, reminding the reader of the smoothness and the bite of the stories her women tell. At the close of this collection, the major thing one is left wanting is more — more women brought into the conversation, more voices from genres beyond fiction, or from more locations in the African Diasporic world. What would Griffiths’ speakers say, one wonders, to Billie Holiday’s passed-down parables in the blues classic “God Bless the Child” (1941)? How would they respond to the hard-won woman-wisdom of Nnu Ego in Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), or to the defiantly direct courtroom testimony of nineteenth-century Caribbean-born slave autobiographer Mary Prince (1831)? But that is not Griffiths’s goal in this collection. This conversation is more or less local in its geographical and temporal spans, but it is expansive in its scope of thought and feeling. The want you feel at the end of Mule & Pear is just the kind of want you hope for in turning the last page of a good book. It’s the wish that the voices you have been sitting with will not leave, the promise that the conversation will continue.