Poetry

Anthology of new work honoring the legacy of a celebrated African American poetThis carefully and generously curated mosaic of essays, letters, and poems reveals the profound impact that poet Yusef Komunyakaa has had on poets, educators, and readers...

Poignant and beautifully examined, poet Yazmin Monét Watkins takes readers on an introspective journey through the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, family, self-love, and all things Black Girl Magic. Years in the making, A Vessel Born to Float...

For decades, Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry: from Medgar Evers in Turn Me Loose, winner of the NAACP Award; to York, the enslaved explorer who joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, in...

In Christian Collier's debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones,...

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time. Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of...

A new and expanded edition of one of the essential works of twenty-first-century literature Zong! is a haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry. In November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be...

In Attic Rain, her debut poetry collection, Calgary based poet and writer Samantha Jones puts obsessive-compulsive disorder centre stage. Lines and words repeat, write over themselves, and read top to bottom and back again, emphasizing themes of...

2000 Blacks probes the complexity of economic and politically motivated migration from Africa, which has been referred to as "African Brain Drain." In the first sequence of poems, Ajibola Tolase explores Africa's history and encounters with the Western...

"A husband reads his dead wife's poems to a spare crowd, while cannibals go hungry with no one to invite to dinner. Whether bearing witness to the torment of a mother who drowns her own children, or to the quiet sorrows of daughters mourning their mother...

A debut collection of lyric poems interrogating the generational implications of the Great Migration to Northern California. Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, a debut collection by E. Hughes, marries personal narrative with historical excavation to articulate...

Anthology of new work honoring the legacy of a celebrated African American poetThis carefully and generously curated mosaic of essays, letters, and poems reveals the profound impact that poet Yusef Komunyakaa has had on poets, educators, and readers...

"Breezes blowin' middlin' brisk, / Snowflakes thro' the air a-whisk, / Fallin' kind o' soft an' light, /Not enough to make things white, / But jest sorter siftin' down / So 's to cover up the brown /Of the dark world's rugged ways / 'N' make things look...

Winner of the Blessing the Boats SelectionForeword by Aracelis GirmayCharleen McClure's d-sorientation wanders the landscape of loss with a weathered eye and a clenched fist. Delving deep into personal hauntologies, McClure's speakers are...

Boldly lyrical and fiercely honest, Mahogany L. Browne's Chrome Valley offers an intricate portrait of Black womanhood in America. "We praise their names / & the hands that write / Praise the mouth that speaks," she writes in tribute to those who came...

Autobiomythography of sifts through Nigerian stories and mythologies, both inherited and invented, to explore the self, family, and nationhood.In an attempt at decolonization, it is an exploration of what it means to be a subject--a person, yes, but also...

Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington's Yard Show to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States. As seen through the documentation of...