Poetry

In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Ther? Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and...

Rowan Ricardo Phillips's fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title. This beautiful, slender collection--small and weighted like a coin--is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as...

51 achingly eloquent poems from a young Cave Canem fellow: W. J. Lofton's verses explore Black queer Southern identity, grief, love, and intimacy while enduring and witnessing unfreedom in America W. J. Lofton writes vivid, accessible poems that channel...

A hybrid collection that explores the dual nature of water as both a destructive and healing force, mirroring the experiences of Black women and girls. A hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed explores the various experiences...

Sunbreak: Notes on Hope, from breakout social media poet Donovan Beck, is a rousing collection of poetry and prose written in an effort to create a world in which poetry books are not just expressions of grief or loss but also ones of optimism and light...

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic--but equally rich--lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put...

WASH brutally dissects black womxnhood for all its blood, beauty, sacrifice and strength. Ebony Stewart's praise and pleas for the lives of black womxn create a devotional space for healing.Stewart's third collection is uncompromising and emotionally...

A visionary anthology that examines and reimagines the archive as a form of collective record-keeping, featuring work by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mahogany L. Brown, and many new and emerging voices.Inspired by Naima Yael...

Shane McCrae, "peer to the peerless" (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell. Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don't knowO muse of where...

Soul Sessions: Haikus on Love, My Heritage, Liberation, and Seasons takes readers on a journey through love, identity, and resilience, all captured within the timeless art of haiku. In this collection, Breuna Walker reflects on her African-American...