Poetry

Wail Song: or wading in the water at the end of the world is a multi-form long poem that offers an extended contemplation on being that lays bare how the construction of the human and the animal both rely on black abjection. Readers find themselves in...

This selection of more than forty poems from a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance includes both uncompromising indictments of racial injustice and celebrations of the triumphs of African-Americans. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the...

Rest like the sun does: Schedule some timeto stay out of sightwhen too many peoplepraise warm energy ...THE BOOK.Poet Laureate Marcus Amaker's (he/him) tenth book, Hold What Makes You Whole, is a pocket-sized full-color collection of new and selected...

Beauty is a poetry collection about racial identity in America for youth and adults. The author's personal experiences are woven into poetic narratives and verses that share thoughts, feelings, and ideas about each situation. Beauty addresses societal...

A poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black lives and the afterlife of slavery.In 1841, the only successful, large-scale revolt of American-born enslaved people erupted on the...

A call to anyone who thought they were alone on the journey, Incantations for Rest is for kindred spirits: neurodivergent folks, parents up late past bedtime nursing resentment, Black people in predominantly white spaces--anyone who has found themselves...

Who are Black Creoles? Saloy's new poems address ancestral connections to contemporary life, traditions celebrated, New Orleans Black life today, Louisiana Black life today, enduring and surviving hurricanes, romance, #BlackLivesMatter, #wematter, as...

In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those...

The speaker of Testify returns to divulge his parents' love story. Set in Anderson, Indiana in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism. Eschewing the "lyrical I" in...

A poet's final barbed compilation that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan's eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and...

Authored during a time of great personal challenge, this book collects poems and rhymes that will inspire a range of emotions. Often relatable in their depiction of the universal human condition, hopefully you will see some of your own journey reflected...

A collection of poems to transport the reader on a literary journey of discovery through loss, love, family dispersion, and immigration. These poems drip with an alchemical admixture of tenderness, violence, despair, and hope, as testament to our...

To Be Named Something Else, winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage--both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix's debut...

Will You Buy My Wares? is a collection of poems exploring love, loss, pain, heartbreak, identity, mental illness, and hope. Some poems were inspired by stories of people close to the author, and some by patients in the hospital where he worked.