Poetry

In eel on reef, Uche Nduka challenges every expectation of an African poet. His unique voice is a heady amalgam of Christopher Okigbo, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Kamau Brathwaite, and that which only Nduka can bring. Uche Nduka was born and raised in...

Ephemeral yet tangible, bridging the delicate border between understanding and awe, Rodney Terich Leonard's poems live in the world even as they leave it, clinging like "a ribbon in the sand / Captivated by your ankle," that "Bojangles next to your chair...

What I Should've Texted is a collection of words that have been buried. A spill of hidden thoughts that never made their way out. This collection from poet Pierre Alex Jeanty is a beautiful expression of the unspoken things that needed to be said and...

Everybody has a story to tell, and this story is told in a most unique way-through the beauty, rhythm, and honesty of poetry.The author's story is one that has yet to be completed or even reach its peak, but he has experienced many things in his...

In Every Hard Sweetness, Carter-Jones chronicles Civil Rights' era atrocities through the story of her family's experience with an all-too-common practice in which Black men were wrongfully incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. The...

Lynne Thompson's Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women--their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these...

Sweeping from the eighteenth century to futurist fabulations, Black Bell harmonizes poetry with performance art practices in an investigation of fugitivity.Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison...

An open mouth...open to bear witness, to show what lives inside, to share what must come forward: the poems in this collection add one more voice to the human chorus that sings as proof of life - funky, messy, soulful, struggling, exhilarating life.

Through invention and remembrance, a little bump in the earth creates a black town on a hill--its land, its losses, its living and ancestral dead.Tyree Daye's a little bump in the earth is an act of invention and remembrance. Through sprawling poems, the...

One study (NCBI, 2014*) showed that 63% of Black people believe that a mental health condition is a sign of personal weakness. This belief has resulted in many experiencing shame in coming forward about mental health struggles for fear of being demonized...

I, John De Conqueror, is a much needed examination of how the word, the pen, and the body when possessed by Black men can be used to illuminate the horrors of racism and whiteness, and the tribulations of humanity's loss. This is a book well worth the...