BloodFresh is a creative collection of honest poems and short stories that take risks in pulling itself out of disappointment, loss, and trauma only to operate in triumph by way of survival. This body of work speaks to the inner child, the everyday person, and future happy self told through Ebony Stewart also known as the Gully Princess. Welcome to BloodFresh.

The official re-release of Ebony Stewart’s latest collection Home.Girl.Hood.

Rings on every finger. Hood and educated AF. You’ve met her. Wearing all her feelings and responding with a side-eye or a tongue-pop. You’ve seen her. At the grocery store. In restaurants. On the subway. At the bus stop. In a car you pulled up next to blaring whatever matches her mood. Hair in some natural or protective style for the Gods. Ebony Stewart. An around the way girl. One part human, all parts womxn. You know these poems because they be familiar. They be your grandmama, mama, auntie, and sis stories. Welcome to Home.Girl.Hood.

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.

A powerful and expertly told novel in verse by an award-winning poet, about a 12-year-old Dominican American swimmer who is diagnosed with Juvenile Arthritis.

Aniana del Mar belongs in the water like a dolphin belongs to the sea. But she and Papi keep her swim practices and meets hidden from Mami, who has never recovered from losing someone she loves to the water years ago. That is, until the day Ani’s stiffness and swollen joints mean she can no longer get out of bed, and Ani is forced to reveal just how important swimming is to her. Mami forbids her from returning to the water but Ani and her doctor believe that swimming along with medication will help Ani manage her disease. What follows is the journey of a girl who must grieve who she once was in order to rise like the tide and become the young woman she is meant to be. Aniana Del Mar Jumps In is a poignant story about chronic illness and disability, the secrets between mothers and daughters, the harm we do to the ones we love the most—and all the triumphs, big and small, that keep us afloat.

Newsworthy wrestles with living in a culture infected by white supremacy where current media is distrusted, cursory, and impossible to escape. And yet, we yearn to know. We crave a thoughtfulness--apart from soundbites and viral videos--that plumbs deeper, one that reawakens our shared humanity by reminding us that under headlines beat all of our "pierced hearts."

A leading light in the new poetic guard, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton's collection is a poetic reimagining of the newspaper, collecting cutouts from the editing floor to resurrect those who would otherwise be forgotten. Not content to further sensationalize the horrors perpetrated on Black Americans by a broken justice system, Mouton boldly relays stories of police brutality by reinventing poetic form and function, reminding us that wisdom, context, and every angle of truth is what infuses information with elucidation.

Akin to An American Marriage, Newsworthy grounds the fragility and danger inherent in contemporary Black experience in an "ordinary" family: mother, father, brother (Josh), and sister (Amandla), following their near and lived tragedies against the backdrop of murdered black Americans. Amandla serves as a surrogate for all of us, regardless of skin color, morphing from naive bystander to headline herself. Alongside her, we witness the exponential compilation of threat. We learn to conceive of dread, anger, compassion, suffering, and love as survival tactics. And we uncover what we should have seen all along: that to be human in the world is to rectify its injustices. With Newsworthy, Mouton brings us news of the heart.

If the question is America-and by extension, who is and what does it mean to be American? -AFRICANAMERICAN'T offers no answers. The CAN'T in the title suggests impossibility and that is precisely what the book is interested in. Even in the so-called land of opportunity, some things remain impossible for its speaker(s). In a way, AFRICANAMERICAN'T is a document of attempted refusals: assimilation, forgetting, and allegiance to any one country. However valid despair might be as a response to the continued failings of his two countries, Ayokunle Falomo traverses the distance between betrayal and love in an attempt to find poetry-and perhaps, something like hope-in all the places it can't be found.

“Words carry the dead like henchmen,” in Joshua Burton’s extraordinary debut volume, Grace Engine. These spare and powerful poems are like pallbearers, like eulogists, like survivors, like battered souls hoping and dreaming for a future that may never be. Grappling head-on with the history of lynchings, mental illness, and the endurance of black bodies and psyches against impossible odds, Burton writes, “I spent so many years being afraid to be black, that now / I am only afraid of silence, / / or the silence that it brings.”

Burton experiments with spaces, absences, and forms in navigating the tensions between shame and accountability, guilt and forgiveness, to understand how one finds the ability to cope under the worst of conditions. With patience and ferocity, he delves into generational and familial trauma to question whether black strength is inherent to blackness and to build a mechanism to survive and heal.
 
I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed 

themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”