50 Poetry Books by Black Writers about Justice, Abolition, and Black History
The is a condensed list from Twitter, and thanks to everyone who suggested books. Twitter be coming through when it comes down to it. I have not read all of the books listed below and have relied on the descriptions found on the publisher’s site or blurbs. If you are on this list and don’t think your book belongs, lemme know. Books are listed in alphabetical order by last name. This list is incomplete and more should be included, I know. Nevertheless, enjoy! Click the images to buy the book.
america, MINE (co-im-press) by Sasha Banks
Sasha Banks's searing debut poetry collection america, MINE is a radical conjuring of a post-white supremacist United States of America. Blending speculative poetics and historiography, Banks creates a rich revisionist account of America, in which its most fraught institutions collapse and Uhmareka emerges—layering a new, strange, and graphic landscape with the textures of supernatural happenings, ghosts, creatures, and inconsistent recollections of American histories. Spurred on by the trauma of and lack of local and national accountability for Michael Brown's murder in 2014, Banks mixes magical realism and keen rage to interrogate white supremacy's narratives, challenge its prerogatives, and usher in a future where it can thrive no longer. In so doing, these Afrofuturist poems by turns summon historical and archetypal Black figures like Fannie Lou Hamer and Aunt Jemima to the National Mall; rouse the ghosts of Tituba, Rekia Boyd, and Cynthia Wesley at the Canfield Green Apartments in Ferguson; and describe a period of raucous destruction before Uhmareka is ushered in by the strange and mysterious forces that herald it. Will Black lives thrive in the re-envisioned Uhmareka, or will they struggle to balance new freedom with the lingering fear of the old ways' return? In america, MINE, Sasha Banks demands that we consider what possibility may spring forth from such imagining.
S O S (Grove Press) by Amiri Baraka
Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka—”whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others” (New York Times)—was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years.
Felon (W. W. Norton) by Reginald Dwayne Betts
The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.
Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books) by Tommye Blount
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 police officer – the titular “man in blue” – becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous, erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: “It’s a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself.” In “Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum,” the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an “infant’s small mouth” as well as the “sad calculator” that was “built to subtract from and divide a town.” In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the “other” and locates us squarely within these personae.
A Map to the Door of No Return (Penguin) by Dionne Brand
Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.
Riot (Broadside Press) by Gwendolyn Brooks
Riot is a poem in three parts, only one part of which has appeared in print before. It arises from the disturbances in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan University Press) by Aimé Césaire's translated by Clayton Eshleman
Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Césaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.
Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books) by Cortney Lamar Charleston
Cortney Lamar Charleston's debut collection looks unflinchingly at the state of race in 21st Century America. Today, as much as ever before, the black body is the battleground on which war is being waged in our inner cities, and Charleston bares witness with fear, anger, and glimpses of hope. He watches the injustice on TV, experiences it firsthand at simple traffic stops, and even gives voice to those like Eric Garner and Sandra Bland who no longer can. TELEPATHOLOGIES is a shout in the darkness, a plea for sanity in an age of insantiy, and an urgent call to action.
I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Tiana Clark
For poet Tiana Clark, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, her own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because Tiana cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past—she will always see blood on the leaves.
Mercurochrome (Black Sparrow Press) by Wanda Coleman
"i am an outlaw, they assert./ there's a ten-digit number stamped on my frontal lobe." This sprawling eleventh collection of poems from the Los Angeles-based Coleman finds her zig-zagging between continuations of series begun in American Sonnets and the 1999 Lenore Marshall Prize-winning Bathwater Wine, and grief-stricken ruminations written out of her son's early death from cancer. Coleman, long a front-line voice in the battle against America's seemingly endless supply of institutionalized racism, sets her sights on store owners, academicians, and the brands of social hypocrisy particular to her home city: "the intellectuals are walking/ around with Boy Scout knives/ buried in their brains/ while over three hundred corpses a year/ are found rotting in Griffith Park." The six sections of the book are sharply set off via subject matter, with the dream-shaped, long-form meditations on consciousness in "A Kingdom of Clouds" and the smoldering race-based critiques in "Metaphysically Niggerish" especially strong. An eighty-one page section of imitations and transliterations of poets from Ammons to Zukofsky (using Mark Strand's anthology The Contemporary American Poets as a source) serves as a different kind of departure point, as Coleman creates dialogs with mostly White poets through a close study and recasting of their own lines: "The academy of the future has closed doors. / It is unwilling—books banned, curtains drawn." (after John Ashbery) The book's length at times dilutes the poetry's overall power, perhaps a by-product of Black Sparrow's insistence on long manuscripts from its authors, but this is a minor complaint. In her mid-fifties, with a formidable collection of work already behind her, Coleman's emotional depth and battered, unwavering search for private and public levels of justice continues to expand. —Publishers Weekly
The Black Condition ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books) by jayy dodd
THE BLACK CONDITION FT. NARCISSUS is preemptive memoir, documenting the beginning of the author’s gender transition and paralleling the inauguration of our latest Administration. These poems speak to and from fears holed up inside while contextualizing the cosmic impacts of our political landscape. Ranging from autobiographic melancholy to rigorously meditative, here is a necessary voice to process the world, predicated on unknowable desire and blossoming tragedy.
On the Bus with Rosa Parks (W. W. Norton) by Rita Dove
In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos", to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.
Brutal Imagination (Penguin) by Cornelius Eady
This poetry collection explores the vision of the black man in white imagination, as well as the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. These two main themes showcase Cornelius Eady’s range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary.
Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights) by Tongo Eisen-Martin
"I don't know that there is a living writer whose work loves Black people as much as Tongo Eisen-Martin's work loves us. In Heaven Is All Goodbyes, like all of Eisen-Martin's work, this Black love is not clumsy, easy, sentimental or reliant on spectacle. That Black love lives in the cracked history and ambient future of who we've been in the dark, and what's been done to us in the light. These poems somehow watch and listen without intervening. And when they ask, they ask everything. Heaven Is All Goodbyes makes me want to live, and write, with us forever." –Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
We Inherit What the Fires Left (Simon and Schuster) by William Evans
This eloquent collection explores not only what these inheritances are composed of, but what price the bearer must pay for such legacies, and the costly tolls exacted on both body and spirit. Evans writes searingly from the perspective of the marginalized, delivering an unflinching examination of what it is like to be a black man raising a daughter in predominantly white spaces, and the struggle to build a home and a future while carrying the weight of the past.
1919 (Haymarket Books) by Eve Ewing
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.
Head Off & Split (Northwestern University Press) by Nikky Finney
The poems in Nikky Finney's breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney's poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president's final State of the Union address.
When the Ghosts Come Ashore (Button Poetry) by Jacqui Germain
“The poems in Jacqui Germain’s When the Ghosts Come Ashore are the cross-section of a body mid escape. Placelessness is the place, leaving only the unsafety of flesh as a hideout. Black presences break from the margins and pierce through these hard lyrics. Nat Turner saws away at the MLK Memorial in DC while St. Louis itself curses the speaker her privileges. All the white boys are dangerous and “there is a demon in everything.” Germain has made of her craft an exorcism: “Let my anger be the celebration we were never / supposed to have.” Let it. Let it.” — Phillip B. Williams, author of Thief in the Interior
Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement (Morrow Quill) by Nikki Giovanni
Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement is one of the single most important volumes of modern African-American poetry. This book, electrifying generations with its revolutionary phrases and inspiring them with such Nikki Giovanni masterpieces as the lyrical "Nikki-Rosa" and the intimate "Knoxville, Tennessee," is the seminal volume of Nikki Giovanni's body of work. Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement made Nikki Giovanni famous in 1968, and this reissue of her classic will enthrall those who have always adored her poems--and those who are just getting to know her work.
The Black Maria (BOA Editions) by Aracelis Girmay
Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay’s newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better.
Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (W. W. Norton) by Robert Hayden
He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden’s work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice—characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern—is a seminal one in American life and literature.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin) by Terrance Hayes
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered–the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
The Weary Blues (Penguin) by Langston Hughes
Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening “Proem” (prologue poem)—“I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa”—Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, “His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race . . . Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal,” and, he concludes, they are the expression of “an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature.” That illusive nature darts among these early lines and begins to reveal itself, with precocious confidence and clarity.
After Jubilee (BOAAT Press) by Brionne Janae
“Blessed” is the word that comes to mind after reading Brionne Janae’s After Jubilee, a collection of finely-tuned narratives presenting characters in a precarious balance between love and hate. Many voices collude to answer for both the jubilation and horror that has plagued black people from the beginning, including the black man with the white father, the parents donating their infant son’s organs to save other lives, and those ignored and forgotten in the massacre at Slocum, Texas in 1910. I find myself locating in these poems the “vital things” that make loss bearable. Janae offers one profoundly important truth: this history is as much in front of us as it is behind us; fortunately for our survival, we have not slipped past redemption. This is an excellent read, if for no other reason than the range and lyricism of Janae’s voice. — Amber Flora Thomas
The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press) by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley's "age"—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley's relationship to black people and their individual "mercies" is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.
Olio (Wave Books) by Tyehimba Jess
With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.
dark // thing (Pleiades Press) by Ashley M. Jones
dark // thing is a multi-faceted work that explores the darkness/otherness by which the world sees Black people. Ashley M. Jones stares directly into the face of the racism that allows people to be seen as dark things, as objects that can be killed/enslaved/oppressed/devalued. This work, full as it is of slashes of all kinds, ultimately separates darkness from thingness, affirming and celebrating humanity.
We’re On: A June Jordan Reader (Alice James Books) by June Jordan
Poet, activist, and essayist June Jordan is a prolific, significant American writer who pushed the limits of political vision and moral witness, traversing a career of over forty years. With poetry, prose, letters, and more, this reader is a key resource for understanding the scope, complexity, and novelty of this pioneering Black American writer.
Patient (Black Lawrence Press) by Bettina Judd
“J. Marion Sims, the legendary, now controversial, 19th century gynecologist looms large in Bettina Judd’s recent collection Patient. Sophisticated, complex, haunting, Patient. beckons readers to remember, to feel, to think deeply, to discover, to probe. Slavery’s stench, the bodies of Black women, death, scientific racism, memory-these themes link the poems in extraordinary ways. Judd is a masterful new poet. Patient. is unforgettable!!” -Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Founding Director and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, Spelman College
The Black Automaton (Fence Books) by Douglas Kearney
From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, The Black Automaton troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life. In this collection bodies at risk seek renewal through violence and fertility, history and myth, flesh and radios.
Voyage of the Sable Venus (Penguin) by Robin Coste Lewis
Robin Coste Lewis’s electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present–titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis’s own autobiographical poems, “Voyage” is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin–five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire–how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis’s book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race–a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
The Black Unicorn (W. W. Norton) by Audre Lorde
Rich continues: "Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye."
In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press) by Shane McCrae
Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love.
Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press) by Dawn Lundy Martin
In her latest collection, Martin contemplates the corporeal aspects of black identity, including scars from historical traumas and pain from fresher wounds. The former, which are largely related to slavery, forced labor, beatings, and lynchings, are “a story left in the dark body.”A sinister “stranger” makes regular appearances, “ever-beckoning, black eyed and grinning”; he is both alluring and repellent. This contradiction is astutely delineated: “A thing you don’t want can make you ravenous.” Some of the poems are taken from a libretto performed at the Whitney Museum for the Yam Collective; these feature characters such as Nave, who is “haunted and empowered by connectedness to ancestors and traditions,” and Perpetuus, a genderless being “untethered from the history of the body on Earth.” The collection is not entirely grim. Existential insignificance is made palatable by imagining one is “God’s little bird.” Having done away with the stranger, the speaker is “a fish. Not pondering the hook.” Martin experiments with form, toying with the page’s negative space, and the inclusion of photographs makes the book a mixed-media experience. In this esoteric and ruminative work, God is shown to be present in the midst of a host of desires and griefs both great and small. —Publishers Weekly
Stereo(TYPE) (Small Press Distribution) by Jonah Mixon-Webster
Jonah Mixon-Webster urgently considers the poetics of space and body, of race and region, of sexuality and class in the present day— the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; systemic racism—within the architecture of the current collective crisis and imagination. To take up space in an experimental way, through lyric, sound and conceptual art, this collection activates the contentious trope of “The Real Nigga” as zombie (embodiment of the thing already dead), linguistic substrata (the basis and site of identity through language formation and synthesis), and as precursor for colonizing archetypes (in the Jungian sense—an unconscious, collectively inherited idea that develops into socially constructed and consciously typified symbols of human identity and function). He challenges current stereotypes through the character’s experience and through mythology; “Now this nigga Niggaphus was the darkest 'mortal' anybody had ever seen in Greece.”
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (Haymarket Books) by Aja Monet
Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books) by John Murillo
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 mother battered by a father’s fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker “to become something unbreakable.” The presence of these and poetic forbears—Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa—provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice. “Maybe memory is the only home / you get,” Murillo writes, “and rage, where you/first learn how fragile the axis/upon which everything tilts.”
A Wreath for Emmett Till (HMH Books) by Marilyn Nelson
In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention.
Magical Negro (Tin House) by Morgan Parker
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics―of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present―timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
White Blood: A Virginia Lyric (Sarabande Books) by Kiki Petrosino
In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem “The Shop at Monticello,” she writes: “I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I’m a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.” Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino’s name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.
Zong! (Wesleyan University Press) by M. NourbeSe Philip
In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.
Hull (Nightboat Books) by Xandria Phillips
In this debut collection by African American poet Xandria Phillips, HULL explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings. HULL is lyrical, layered, history-ridden, experimental, textured, adorned, ecstatic, and emotionally investigative.
How to Exterminate the Black Woman (PANK) by Monica Prince
In a country grappling with its bloody history and uncertain future, How to Exterminate the Black Woman illuminates the struggle of the Black woman trying to thrive in a society seeking to consume and erase her. Set after the murder of Sandra Bland, or Trayvon Martin, or Emmett Till, this choreopoem takes place in the collective memory of American Black women, represented by Angela fractured into six emotions: fear, loss, silence, expectation, fury, and new. Through chanted sestinas, yoga-inspired dances, and a chorus of the subconscious, How to Exterminate the Black Woman confronts readers and audiences with the terrors and triumphs that mark Black women in the United States, from burying their murdered children and surviving rape to going natural and falling in love. More than just #BlackGirlMagic, this choreopoem casts a literary spell, demanding empathy, action, and humanity from the stage.
Citizen (Graywolf Press) by Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
The Black Back-Ups (Firebrand Books) by Kate Rushin
In her first collection, constructed with interlocking passages of prose and poetry, Rushin focuses on being a black child and then a black woman in a world where power has been controlled predominantly by white men. The metaphor of the title poem, dedicated to ``. . . all of the Black women who sang back-up for / Elvis Presley, John Denver, James Taylor, Lou Reed. / Etc. Etc. Etc.,'' is developed in small autobiographical sketches, such as that of a grandmother who purchased silverware with a dollar and a coupon from Nabisco Shredded Wheat. There is a tender quality in much of the work, which can be attributed to the poet's role as ``bridge,'' which she playfully complains about: ``I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister my little sister to my brother my brother to the White Feminists . . . '' At times she demonstrates an acute sensitivity to detail (``I am Invisible Woman / The itch in the middle of your back / . . . The meat / Between / Your teeth''), but in some of the overtly political poems Rushin loses her concentration and what follows (a portrait of construction workers, for instance) veers toward stereotype while the language becomes deflated. —Publishers Weekly
Descent (Tarpaulin Press) by Lauren Russell
In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary’s omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present.
Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press) by Safiya Sinclair
Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.
Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press) by Danez Smith
Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press) by Patricia Smith
She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.
Native Guard (HMH Books) by Natasha Trethewey
Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South -- where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.