Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Among the essays included here are:

• "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"
• "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
• "I Am Your Sister"
• Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of Light

The poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:

• "Martha"
• "A Litany for Survival"
• "Sister Outsider"
• "Making Love to Concrete"

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles Shanahan’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

Winner of the American Book Award
A classic of the Black Arts Movement brought back to life in a refreshed edition

"A lion in literature's forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly."— Maya Angelou

Originally published in 1984, this collection of prose, prose poems and lyric verses is as fresh and radical today as it was then. Sonia Sanchez, the premiere poet of the Black Arts Movement, shows the “razor blades” in clenched in her teeth in these powerful pieces.

The award-winning, genre-crossing writer demonstrates her power as a funkadelic and formidable feminist voice in this rich and beautiful collection of verse and image—a multi-part retrospective that traverses time, space, and reality to illuminate the expansiveness of Black femme lives.

Side Notes from the Archivist is a preservation of Black culture viewed through a feminist lens. The Archivist leads readers through poems that epitomize youthful renditions of a Black girl coming of age in Philadelphia’s pre-funk ’80s; episodic adventures of “the Black Girl” whose life is depicted through the white gaze; and selections of verse evincing affection for self and testimony to the magnificence within Black femme culture at-large.

Every poem in Side Notes elevates and honestly illustrates the buoyancy of Blackness and the calamity of Black lives on earth. In her uniquely embracing and experimental style, Anastacia-Reneé documents these truths as celebrations of diverse subjects, from Solid Gold to halal hotdogs; as homages and reflections on iconic images, from Marsha P. Johnson to Aunt Jemima; and as critiques of systemic oppression forcing some to countdown their last heartbeat.

From internet “Fame” to the toxicity of the white gaze, Side Notes from the Archivist cements Anastacia-Reneé role as a leading light in the womanist movement—an artist whose work is in conversation with advocates of Black culture and thought such as Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni.

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From Lincoln Center’s inaugural poet-in-residence comes this unflinching collection that intricately mines the experience of being a Black woman in America.

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 before her.

Browne captures a quintessential girlhood through the pleasures and pangs of young love: the thrill of skating hip to hip at the roller rink, the heat of holding hands in the dark, and, sometimes, the sting of a palm across the cheek. Friendship, too, comes with its own complex yearnings: “you ain’t had freedom / ’til you climb on bus 62 / & head to the closest mall / for a good seat at the girl fight.”

Reflections of Browne’s mother, Redbone, bolster the collection with moments of unwavering strength: “give me my mother’s bone structure / & her gap tooth slaughter / give me her spine—Redbone got a spine for the world.” Other moments explore the inherent anxieties shared among Black mothers, rhythmically intoning names like the tolling of a church bell: “Because Kadiatou Diallo / Because Sybrina Fulton / Because Valeria Bell / Because Mamie Till.”

The characters in Chrome Valley grapple with the legacies of inherited trauma but also revel in the beauty of the undaunted self-determination passed down from Black woman to Black woman. Transcendent and grounded, funny and furious, Chrome Valley brings depth to a movement, solidifying Mahogany L. Browne as one of the most significant poetic voices of our time.

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A groundbreaking collection of poems addressing how every kind of love—self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural—is birthed, shaped, and complicated by the invisible forces of gender, capitalism, religion, and so on. But even though the path to love is not easy, it is a path worth treading.

Love is at the heart of everything we do, and yet it is often mishandled, misrepresented, or narrowly defined. In the words of José Olivarez: “How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love—but what about our friends? Those homies who show up when the romance ends to help you heal your heart. Those homies who are there all along—cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant.”

Written in English and combined with a Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, “Promises of Gold explores many forms of love and how “a promise made isn’t always a promise kept,” as Olivarez grapples with the contradictions of the American Dream laying bare the ways in which “love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts.”

He writes, “For those of us who are hyphenated Americans, where do we belong? Promises of Gold attempts to reckon with colonial legacy and the reality of what those promises have borne out for Mexican descendants. I wrote this book to imagine and document an ongoing practice of healing—healing that requires me to show up for myself, my community, my friends, my family, and my loves every day.”

Whether readers enter this collection in English or Spanish, these extraordinary poems are sure to become beloved for their illuminations of life—and love.

A black British poet making her thrilling American debut explores the importance of “quiet” in producing forms of community, resistance, and love.

How does one encounter meaning amid so many kinds of noise? What is quiet when it isn’t silence? Where does quiet exist—and what liberating potential might it hold? These poems dwell on ideas of black interiority, intimacy, and selfhood, and they celebrate as fiercely as they mourn. With a metaphysical edge and a formal restlessness attuned to both the sonics and the inadequacies of language, Quiet navigates the tension between the impulse to guard one’s inner life and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, "your silence will not protect you."

How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected.

These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.

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A brave new collection of poems from Sandra Cisneros, the best-selling author of The House on Mango Street.

It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published a book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.

In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award–winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity—climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss.

The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man.

Daring and formally elegant, Best Barbarian asks the reader: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?” Reeves extends his inquiry into the work of writers who have come before, conversing with—and sometimes contradicting—Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, and Aimé Césaire, among others. Expanding the tradition of poetry to reach from Gilgamesh and the Aeneid to Drake and Beyoncé, Reeves adds his voice to a long song that seeks to address itself “only to freedom.”

Best Barbarian asks the reader to stay close as it plunges into catastrophe and finds surprising moments of joy and intimacy. This fearless, musical, and oracular collection announces Roger Reeves as an essential voice in American poetry.

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Winner of the 2020 Donald Hall Prize

Priest’s debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter’s waywardness as aspirational. Across the book’s three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self—a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky’s world-famous horseracing track—before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of “the horses & their restless minds.”
 
 FROM "RODEO"
 
The four-wheeler is a chariot. Horse-wraiths
Kicking up a plume of spirits in the dirt behind us.
Her arms kudzu around my middle. Out here,
 
In the desert, everything is invisible.
Only the locusts’ flat buzz gives
Them away. Everything native & quieting

Icon of women's movement and author of over twenty books, including a narrative series on love, bell hooks reminds us of the good and bad moments we spend in love through her inspiring poetry.

When Angels Speak of Love is a book of 50 love poems by the icon of the feminist movement and most famous among public intellectuals. In beautiful, profoundly poetic terms, hooks challenges our views and experiences with love--tracing the link between seduction and surrender, the intensity of desire, and the anguish of death. Whether towards family, friends, or oneself, hooks's creative genius makes love both magical and beautiful. Her poems are written from the heart and learned by the reader's heart.

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Stepmotherland is a tour-de-force debut collection about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America.

Winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.

Holnes’s poems experiment with macaronic language, literary forms, and prosody. In their inventiveness, they create a new tradition that blurs the borders between poetry, visual art, and dramatic text. The new legacy he creates is one with significant reverence for the past, which informs a central desire of immigrants and native-born citizens alike: the desire for a better life. Stepmotherland documents an artist’s evolution into manhood and heralds the arrival of a stunning new poetic voice.

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Intimate poems that explore feminine shame and violence and imagine what liberation from these threats might look like, from the award-winning author of The January Children

In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power. 
 
Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning:
 
[what if i will not die]
 
[what   will govern me then]

Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.

Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood’s relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor’s inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. “Concentrate,” she writes. “We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make.”

A groundbreaking collection about Afropioneerism past and present from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio Cortez

From a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience, comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures. 
 
In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors—some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction—Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom. 

Being queer and Asian American; families we are born into and ones we chose; nostalgia, trauma and history—all dissected fearlessly.

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The highly anticipated collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong

How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part
 
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
 
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.

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In this exquisite book, Alice Walker’s first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us to feeling and understanding, with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the
fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community.

About Walker’s Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, “In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind,” and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.

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As he did for Black women in Black Roses, Harold Green III, poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living, now honors the Black men he most admires—groundbreakers including Tyler Perry, Barry Jenkins, Billy Porter, Chance the Rapper, LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and John Legend—and celebrates their achievements which are transforming lives and making history.

Black men are changing society and the world through mastery, innovation, and inspiration at a pace never seen before. In awe of the myriad ways in which Black men are using their vision and power to remake culture and society, spoken word artist Harold Green began writing odes recognizing the extraordinary accomplishments of a series of Black men, which heshared on his Instagram account—tributes that went viral and became a social media sensation. Black Oak brings together many of these popular odes with original works written for this collection.

Divided into five sections—bravehearts, champions, dreamers, guardians, and humanitarians—Black Oak features iconic men who are spearheading movements, fighting for equality, challenging the status quo, embracing fatherhood, providing a transformative model of masculinity for our children, inspiring a new generation of creators, and more. Through these beautifully written verses, Harold does not simply place the Black men in this book on a pedestal, he transcends even the most positive stereotypes to view these men and their accomplishments in a new light, and creates meaningful connections between these beloved figures and the lives and experiences of readers of all backgrounds. 

Featuring full-color illustrations by Melissa Koby, Black Oak includes odes to Barry Jenkins, Big K.R.I.T, Billy Porter, Black Thought, Chance the Rapper, Charles Booker, Colin Kaepernick, Dwyane Wade, Edmund Graham III, Eric Hale, Excell Hardy Jr., Harold Green III, Harold Green Jr., Harold Green Sr., Hebru Brantley, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jamaal Bowman, Jason Reynolds, Jericho Brown, John Legend, Kehinde Wiley, Kerry James Marshall, Kevin Fredricks, Killer Mike, Kyler Broadus, LeBron James, Mahershala Ali, Marc Lamont Hill, Matthew Cherry, Orlando Cooper, Pharrell, Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III, Rev. Dr. William Barber II, Ryan Coogler, Swizz Beatz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Theaster Gates, Tobe Nwigwe, Tristan Walker, and Tyler Perry.

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A prophetic new collection of poems from Shane McCrae, “a shrewd composer of American stories” (The New Yorker).

Writing you I give the death I take
I know I should feel wounded by your death
I write to you to make a wound write back

Shane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and re-create images of our shared and specific pasts, he writes into and through the wounds that we remember and “strains toward a vision of joy” (Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books).

Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections; he writes of Eden, of the lost tribe that watched time enter the garden and God rehearse the world, and of the cartoon torments of hell. Yet for McCrae, these outer bounds of our universe are inseparable from the lives and deaths on Earth, from the mundanities and miracles of time passing and people growing up, growing old, and growing apart. As he writes, “God first thought time itself / Was flawed but time was God’s first mirror.”

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A Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy.

Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause.

Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?

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The first book of poems from an acclaimed young author, whose meteoric rise has already landed them on the cover of Time Magazine.

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How to Survive the Apocalypse, the second collection from poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble, examines the many apocalypses that African Americans have weathered, advising that those who wish to avoid annihilation should “live by rage and joy and turpentine.” Trimble reimagines the sonnet and the parable, producing poems of ironic indictment and joyous celebration. The book explores aspects of the Black experience in America, from Black woman pride, Nat Turner, kneeling, and the burning down of fast-food restaurants. Sometimes funny, sometimes biting, How to Survive the Apocalypse connects history to the contemporary and in the writing proves that the only balm for rage is creativity.

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The poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living pays tribute to all Black women by focusing on visionaries and leaders who are making history right now, including Ava DuVernay, Janelle Monae, Kamala Harris, Misty Copeland, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Robin Roberts, Roxane Gay, and Simone Biles—with this compilation of celebratory odes featuring full-color illustrations by Melissa Koby.

Black women are exceptional. To honor how Black women use their minds, talent, passion, and power to transform society, Harold Green began writing love letters in verse which he shared on his Instagram account. Balm for our troubled times, his tributes to visionaries and leaders quickly went viral and became a social media sensation. Now, in this remarkable collection, Green brings together many of these popular odes with never-before-seen works. 

A timely celebration of contemporary Black figures who are making history and shaping our culture today, Black Roses is divided into five sections—advocates, curators, innovators, luminaries, trailblazers—reflecting the diversity of Black women’s achievements and the depth of their reach. These inspiring changemakers are leaving their mark on the world by creating new beauty in their respective art forms, heading movements, fighting for equality and to change the status quo, and championing new definitions of what’s possible in every meaningful way. Green lifts them up to create meaningful connections between these figures and our own lives and experiences.

Black Roses spotlights and urges readers to learn more about Allyson Felix, Angelica Ross, Ava DuVernay, Bisa Butler, Bozoma Saint John, Charisma Sweat-Green, Dr. Eve Ewing, Dr. Janice Jackson, Dr. Johnnetta Cole, Eunique Jones-Gibson, Issa Rae, Janelle Monae, Jennifer Hudson, Jessica Matthews, Kamala Harris, Keisha Bottoms, Kimberly Bryant, Kimberly Drew, Lisa Green, Lizzo, Mandilyn Graham, Mellody Hobson, Michelle Alexander, Misty Copeland, Naomi Beckwith, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Rapsody, Raquel Willis, Robin Roberts, Roxane Gay, Shellye Archambeau, Simone Biles, Stacey Abrams, Tabitha Brown, Tamika Mallory, Tarana Burke, Tasha Bell, Tomi Adeyemi, and Tracee Ellis Ross.