Poetry

"It is time to sing." Grown is a gospel, with Claudia Wilson "singing soprano in perfect pitch." Wilson draws the reader into both the poignant melody and discord of blackness in America, through vivid vignettes and hymn-like prose. This collection is...

Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is...

Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's...

In his fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Jackson appropriates the vernacular notion of "rolling deep" to capture the spirit of aesthetic travel that defines these forceful new poems and brazenly announces his steady accretion of literary...

"Circles All The Way Down" is a collection of poetry by Barnabas Smith that explores themes of identity, relationships, and the human condition. The poems are written with the character limit of a tweet, 280 characters, and use vivid imagery and...

John Murillo's second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a...

The poems of award-winning poet Yona Harvey's much anticipated You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female...

Poetry. African American Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. "Up jumps the boogie. That's almost all one needs to say. Murillo is headbreakingly brilliant. I didn't have a favorite poet for this year: Now I do. But with this kind of verve and intelligence...

In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man's late-night encounter with a...

Maya Phillips' stunning debut collection Erou borrows the framework of the traditional Greek epic to interrogate the inner workings of a present-day nuclear family and the role of a patriarch whose life, marriage, and death are imagined as a sort of...

"Where does all the grief go when it's not tugging at your wrist?" Enyegue's debut collection is an ode to girlhood, to Blackness, to generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health. This collection does not aim to heal anyone who reads it, but...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a poem is worth a thousand sentiments. An Old Fart and a Thousand Sentiments takes you on adventure into the fertile imagination of an Old Fart with a jailbroken poetic license. Brace yourself for designed lyrical...

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead The three sections of Terrance Hayes' seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of...

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: Poems is Darius Stewart's first book-length collection of poems drawn from his three previous chapbooks in addition to new poems not collected in those volumes. The result is a book that is more than the sum of its parts,...

This impressive and enjoyable debut poetry collection by American-Tamil poet Selvi M. Bunce and Ugandan poet Mimi Mutesa is enriched with unique illustrations by Mimi. It is a fiery challenge to preconceptions of race and relationships through poems of...