The Weight of Memory is a deeply personal collection of poetry, memoir, and reflective essays by Rickey K. Hood that explores grief, love, spirituality, family, sexuality, and the quiet emotional weight carried through everyday life. Moving between intimate memory and cultural reflection, Hood writes with honesty, compassion, and a voice that feels like a close friend speaking openly about loss, survival, and the search for meaning.
Through poems and essays shaped by real experience, Hood reflects on growing up Black and fatherless in Charlotte, caring for his sick mother, losing loved ones, navigating loneliness within the Black LGBTQ+ experience, and questioning inherited religious beliefs that often wound more than heal. Yet even within sorrow, these pages search for beauty, healing, human connection, and hope.
Blending lyrical poetry with powerful autobiographical storytelling, The Weight of Memory traces a journey from pain toward understanding — from silence toward self-acceptance — while honoring the people whose lives and deaths continue to shape the spirit. At its heart, this is a book about memory itself: how it comforts us, haunts us, teaches us, and ultimately keeps love alive long after loss.
Perfect for readers of reflective poetry, literary memoir, Black literature, and spiritually searching works, The Weight of Memory speaks to anyone who has loved deeply, grieved honestly, and continued searching for light in the midst of life’s hardest seasons.
The Weight of Memory is a deeply personal collection of poetry, memoir, and reflective essays by Rickey K. Hood that explores grief, love, spirituality, family, sexuality, and the quiet emotional weight carried through everyday life. Moving between intimate memory and cultural reflection, Hood writes with honesty, compassion, and a voice that feels like a close friend speaking openly about loss, survival, and the search for meaning.
Through poems and essays shaped by real experience, Hood reflects on growing up Black and fatherless in Charlotte, caring for his sick mother, losing loved ones, navigating loneliness within the Black LGBTQ+ experience, and questioning inherited religious beliefs that often wound more than heal. Yet even within sorrow, these pages search for beauty, healing, human connection, and hope.
Blending lyrical poetry with powerful autobiographical storytelling, The Weight of Memory traces a journey from pain toward understanding — from silence toward self-acceptance — while honoring the people whose lives and deaths continue to shape the spirit. At its heart, this is a book about memory itself: how it comforts us, haunts us, teaches us, and ultimately keeps love alive long after loss.
Perfect for readers of reflective poetry, literary memoir, Black literature, and spiritually searching works, The Weight of Memory speaks to anyone who has loved deeply, grieved honestly, and continued searching for light in the midst of life’s hardest seasons.
