Fruit Punch
An arresting memoir about what it means to come of age at the center of exultant bloodlines and harrowing bloodshed
Written in a distinctive voice and filled with personality, humor, and pathos, Fruit Punch is a memoir unlike any other, from a one-of-a-kind millennial talent. Growing up in Dallas, Texas, in the nineties and early 2000s, Kendra Allen had a complicated, loving, and intense family life filled with desire and community but also undercurrents of violence and turmoil. “We equate suffering to perseverance and misinterpret the weight of shame,” she writes. As she makes her way through a world of obscureness, Kendra finds herself slowly discovering outlets to help navigate growing up and against the expected performance of being a young Black woman in the South—a complex interplay of race, class, and gender that proves to be ever-shifting ground.
Fruit Punch touches on everything from questions of beauty and how we form concepts of ourselves—as a small rebellion, young Kendra scratched a hole into every pair of stockings she was forced to wear—to what it means to grow up in her great uncle’s Southern Baptist church—with rules including “No uncrossed ankles” and “No questions.” Inflected by a powerful sense of place and touched by poetry, Fruit Punch is a stunning achievement—a memoir born of love and endurance, fight or flight, and what it means to be a witness, from a blisteringly honest and observant voice.
Praise for Fruit Punch
"Ntozake Shange implored, 'Somebody, anybody, sing a black girl's song, ' and in Fruit Punch, Kendra Allen sings fiercely for all of us who have been shattered and disregarded, and yet somehow press on. Stunning, poetic, and absolutely devastating, this book broke and healed my heart."
— Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
"A stunning and original memoir about Black girlhood and coming of age. Allen is both storyteller and poet, observing the world with curiosity and humor. Fruit Punch is simultaneously brilliant cultural commentary and an intimate portrayal of family and community, and it will stay with me for a long, long time."
— Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls
“Fruit Punch is a deeply visceral, vividly written tale of how to both survive and honor a complicated family. Kendra Allen has given us a loving memoir full of deep truths, dramatic moments, and undeniably gorgeous prose--how lucky we are to have her talents in the world.”
— Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You and The Middlesteins
"Sensitive and lyrical...Writing in masterfully composed vignettes as vivid and fleeting as real memories, Allen excavates the anger, powerlessness and wonder she experienced as a young Black girl learning to navigate the world...A hauntingly precise meditation...Truly dazzling...A startling, unique and deeply poetic work from a writer on the rise."
— BookPage, starred review
“[P]owerful…[Allen's] writing is filled with insight and humor, and provides a nuanced representation of often-marginalized voices.”
— Washington Post
“There are no tropes or platitudes here; Allen exhibits the same assertiveness and transparency that she showed in her previous books…Complete with ’90s-baby cultural references to Morgan Freeman and Mary J. Blige, the book is a reading experience all its own, holding the reader at an emotional distance, even as it stings. Its fire may be unrelenting, but readers should push themselves to take the heat.”
— New York Times
"Wholly original and unsparing...Allen’s prowess comes through in her blunt rendering of the powerlessness she struggled against as a Black woman navigating race and sexuality in the South...Indeed, the narrative rarely lets up in its frank or discomfiting depictions, but it yields a refreshingly authentic look at what it means to create oneself in a contradictory world."
— Publishers Weekly
"Allen’s rendering of the material is visceral and unique, and her insights are powerful. . . . A piercing coming-of-age narrative from an original voice."
— Kirkus Reviews
“Allen bestows a fresh literary voice on this memoir filled with humor, honesty, and thought-provoking truth…readers will enjoy Allen's intimate writing and the wit she weaves in between epiphanies. With admirable and inspiring vulnerability, Allen brings readers along in her journey to understand her very makeup. Life doesn't grant happy endings, she reminds us; but rather a revolving door of growth and self-reflection.”
— Booklist
The Collection Plate
A deeply wrought and joyful debut poetry collection from an exciting new voice
Looping exultantly through the overlapping experiences of girlhood, Blackness, sex, and personhood in America, award-winning essayist and poet Kendra Allen braids together personal narrative and cultural commentary, wrestling with the beauty and brutality to be found between mothers and daughters, young women and the world, Black bodies and white space, virginity and intrusion, prison and freedom, birth and death. Most of all, The Collection Plate explores both how we collect and erase the voices, lives, and innocence of underrepresented bodies—and behold their pleasure, pain, and possibility
Both formally exciting and a delight to read, The Collection Plate is a testament to Allen’s place as the voice of a generation—and a witness to how we come into being in the twenty-first century.
(Ecco, 2021)
Praise for The Collection Plate
“Kendra Allen's Collection Plate is formally and linguistically invigorating, intertwining and juxtaposing personal and cultural histories to take the reader on a vivid emotional exploration. Allen considers Black exploitation, water crises, white feminism, and the notion of equality, among other failures in and of America. . . . Allen is in command of Our Father's, and other deadly forces', presence in her narratives, which she often wields with searing humor. This is a valuable offering; Collection Plate brings to light the dismantling capacity of laughing in the face of power, while directly examining it with eyes fired open.”
— Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species
“The Collection Plate is as close as we can get to those looming Black spaces beyond and before language. A book shouldn't be able to do this but Kendra Allen is a conjurer as much as she is one of the most complete writers we have ever read.”
— Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and Long Division
“In The Collection Plate, Kendra Allen pries open language, pop culture, gods, and griefs to create an experience that travels across Black generations, the South, and Baptist pews. Allen excavates inherited, shared, and personal memory while simultaneously interrogating the price of American pleasure and weaving together a rich tapestry that illuminates what it means to be a woman, a daughter, and a cultural consumer in an apocalyptic country. The Collection Plate deftly plays with language, each poem becoming its own form that establishes Allen as not just a brilliant storyteller but also an innovator of the sentence and the poetic medium.”
— Hafizah Geter, author of Un-American and The Black Period
"Kendra Allen's poems examine how religion and hierarchy inform the spaces Black women and girls inhabit—and how we blow past those boundaries, swimming toward the horizon even as the undertow threatens to pull us in another direction."
— Essence
"A spectacular debut poetry collection . . . marks the arrival of a singular new talent, a poet whose lyricism is artfully matched by the depths of the emotions she conveys. Allen's poems explore themes of Blackness, womanhood, sex, desire, pain, and belonging, offering glimpses of the casual cruelty and sublime beauty that swim just under the surface of all our experiences.”
— Refinery 29
“The Collection Plate introduces Kendra Allen as a poet to watch. . . . Allen shines a light on the spaces that connect and divide us, coalescing into an electric portrait of joy and pain.”
— Time
When You Learn
the Alphabet
Winner of the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction
Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These dynamics strive for some semblance of accountability, and the essays within this collection are used as displays of deep unlearning and restoring—balancing trauma and humor, poetics and reality, forgiveness and resentment.
When You Learn the Alphabet allots space for large moments of tenderness and empathy for all black bodies—but especially all black woman bodies—space for the underrepresented humanity and uncared for pain of black girls, and space to have the opportunity to be listened to in order to evolve past it.
(University of Iowa Press, 2019)
Praise for When You Learn the Alphabet
“Every generation has its seer, a writer of radical, fierce talent who tells it true, who writes the being and identity like a punch in the gut. Kendra Allen is this generation’s
sharpshooter. To think: this is her first book. We are witnessing the birth of this astonishing star.”
—Jenny Boully, author, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
“Kendra Allen’s When You Learn the Alphabet is a roaring meditation on what black daughters in our nation do with what and how they’ve been taught. The book brilliantly animates the formal and informal education processes of becoming grown in America. Allen somehow manages to make explorations of colorism, language, trauma, war, and love sit comfortably next to one another. Allen’s book is an ambitious, dexterous collection that really obliterates convenient understandings of the sentimental in favor of dynamic, fleshy layers of soulful sincerity. It is a remarkable artistic achievement.”
—Kiese Laymon, judge, Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, author, Heavy: An American Memoir
A promising debut from a writer with much to say.”
—Kirkus Reviews