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In her brilliant debut collection of poetry, Diamond Sharp navigates questions of mental health, grief, and joy through her speaker’s sardonic and playful imagination.

Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? 

Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. 

Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

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."

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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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Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, offers two books in one with this volume of poetry. Jones renders the saga of Palmares, a foundational tale in the annals of colonial terrorism and Black resistance, in verse, told in the voices of the characters in her epic novel Palmares.

In the late 17th century, the fugitive slave enclave of Palmares was destroyed by Portuguese colonists. Amid the flight and re-enslavement of Palmares’s inhabitants emerges the love story of Almeyda and Anninho. In Song for Anninho, Almeyda moves between a dark present, in which she is once again enslaved and abused by a terrible captor, and memories of her lover, Anninho, whom she believes to have been killed. Song for Almeyda, released now for the first time, is told in the voices of Anninho and his fellow warriors.

Fans of Corregidora (one of the New Yorker’s “Best Books We Read in 2020” picks), which tracked the legacy of enslavement, and Palmares will especially appreciate these verses. Brimming with intimacy, history, and revolution, the poems collected serve as a declaration of decolonial love.

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The expansion of Marvel and DC Comics’ characters such as Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Black Lightning in film and on television has created a proliferation of poetry in this genre—receiving wide literary and popular attention.

This groundbreaking collection highlights work from poets who have written verse within this growing tradition, including Terrance Hayes, Lucille Clifton, Gil Scott-Heron, A. Van Jordan, Glenis Redmond, Tracy K. Smith, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Joshua Bennett, Douglas Kearney, Tara Betts, Frank X Walker, Tyree Daye, and others. In addition, the anthology will also feature the work of artists such as John Jennings and Najee Dorsey, showcasing their interpretations of superheroes, Black comic characters, Afrofuturistic images from the African diaspora.

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Maya Angelou’s unforgettable collection of poetry lends its name to the documentary film about her life, And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Thus begins “Phenomenal Woman,” just one of the beloved poems collected here in Maya Angelou’s third book of verse. These poems are powerful, distinctive, and fresh—and, as always, full of the lifting rhythms of love and remembering. And Still I Rise is written from the heart, a celebration of life as only Maya Angelou has discovered it.

Towards What Hurt is a debut poetry collection structured as a ceremony.

In three movements - The Portal Opens, The Wildfire, and The Return - Detroit writer adria moses takes the reader from preparation, through fire, and into return.

Drawing on 15 years of writing through chronic illness, major surgery, domestic violence, and childhood abuse, these poems treat the body as archive and altar. They refuse the demand that healing be soft, worthiness be earned, or survival be quiet.

This is not a wellness book. It is a ceremony in poems that do not flinch. That witness. That burn. That restore.

For the hurt and the healed. For survivors and seekers. For anyone who has chosen to stay awake in a world that rewards numbness.

Towards what hurt is the way home.

Prepare yourself for an unconventional approach to a provocative novel with a poetic vision.

In the post-monetary world, people are coded as "valid" or "invalid" - homeless, no citizenship, no access to goods or services. One day, a glitch in the global information system suddenly switches everyone's coding, and people instantly lose or gain everything. Beginning with veteran Sequoia, whose switch from valid to invalid thrusts her into poverty and homelessness, three women struggle with this massive shift in their lives, challenging systemic assumptions about class, age, gender, and migration along the way.

A 21st century story revealed in the poetry of women determined to make themselves at home-at home in the body, in the city, in the universe, in a rapidly changing world. The future is now-young and old, rich and poor, male and female, and everything in between-all must question themselves to reimagine life and work and reclaim their humanity.

"This innovative novel takes us to the edge of what it means to be human. Ntoso challenges us to grapple with the truth about the world we inhabit. In Ntoso, we find a writer that has the courage to pull the curtain away and show us the harsh realities of what it means to be unseen." -Donnelle McGee, author of Ghost Man

A powerful and innovative debut collection—the first in the new Polaris Poetry Series—that captures the rhythms of Black girlhood as it navigates the spaces between city and southern roots.

Through poems rooted in Hoodoo spirituality and the author’s Gullah Geechee heritage, Shakeema Smalls’s Sweetwater Mass uncovers ways of knowing that transcend physical and temporal barriers, boldly addressing the lived realities of racism, classism, and economic struggle while simultaneously journeying toward joy and transcendence. Drawing on her identity as a Black, queer woman and her family lineage, the “red birds / of the ancestral arcana,” Smalls writes from a place of resistance—against capitalism and systems of oppression—and in search of higher spiritual truths. Smalls’s work finds lineage in the voices of Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Joy KMT, and Nikky Finney, while offering something wholly unique that broadens conversations about systemic violence, poverty, and the complexities of Black girlhood. As she grapples with the intersections of gender, race, class, and resilience, Smalls weaves breath, brevity, and stream of consciousness into poems that hold space for both grief and growth.

The Polaris Poetry Series is edited by Cynthia Manick and features collections of Afrofuturistic and Afrofuturism-adjacent poetry. The series is a dedicated home for this innovative poetic style and for amplifying the voices of Black poets. Sweetwater Mass is the first in the series.

Joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize

In her wide-ranging debut collection, Clementine Ewokolo Burnley asks what remains after once-familiar places and people have gone. The poems criss-cross the Atlantic, beginning in the 1850s. The voices of Caribbean returnees to the west African coast mingle with those of west African recaptives, German missionaries, and kidnappers. They witness the changes in family life through the generations as villagers or townsfolk are uprooted or stay put or uproot themselves, defying expectations by leaving or returning.

Her poems address the past only to illuminate what people can become to each other in the present, whether in Africa or Europe. In one sequence a group of university students from far-flung parts discover the freedoms of student halls in Glasgow. In sequences set in the Hebrides old friends recognise a late-blooming love after decades apart. In other poems, a woman consults her scars. Each sight, sound or smell has its threat value in Germany, and children of mixed heritage switch between languages in Italy. Weary of searching outward, women drop anchor in themselves. A couple find grounding in the non-human world that surrounds them. Going back in search of belonging proves futile only because connection was there all along.

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley was one of three winners of the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize, judged by Major Jackson, Neil Astley, Imtiaz Dharker, Theresa Muñoz and Nathalie Teitler. Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain's first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication by Bloodaxe Books for young or emerging poets of colour.

In The House Has Teeth, award-winning poet Aldo Amparán offers a profound rumination on violence, trauma, and how the spaces meant to protect us can become the most insidious. How can we make sense of deep pain that was caused by an event we can hardly remember?

Influenced by fever dreams, horror movies, and ghost stories, the poems of this second collection eloquently articulate the way in which people who have been traumatized can carry a violence within themselves. Speakers grapple with an internal unrest that simmers long after the initial wound, becoming attuned to the subtle alarms sounding around them that go unheard by others. 

In these pages, nightmares become a vehicle for deeper understanding as Amparán investigates how we learn to live with trauma—how we hold onto it, and how it holds onto us; how it haunts us like a ghost. Lyrical and steeped in surrealism, The House Has Teeth asks whether it’s possible to ever escape— to unknow—such violence. To transcend it. To reach toward love.

Written by internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Sidekick stands as a testament to poetry’s enduring power to bear witness. With each poem, Nye affirms a truth that feels more urgent than ever: every human being deserves safety, dignity, and peace. 

Drawing on her family’s deep roots in Palestine, Nye writes with both abiding love and immeasurable heartbreak, offering intimate reflections that illuminate the human cost of conflict. Long a champion of dialogue across borders and divides, she crafts poems that are direct, conversational, and unafraid to confront the systems and structures that perpetuate harm. 

Through her signature blend of candor, lyrical grace, and careful attention to everyday lives, Nye offers a collection that urges readers to look more closely, feel more deeply, and imagine a world in which we refuse to turn away from one another.

The Body Losing Its Borders is a debut collection shaped by the convergence of profound personal loss and a world rapidly shifting around it. Written across the politically volatile years surrounding the poet’s brother’s cancer diagnosis, these poems trace the disorientation and transformation that follow grief’s arrival. 

Against this stands a country in fracture—women’s bodily autonomy is increasingly under threat, and Black communities are organizing in response to escalating state violence. These poems inhabit that simultaneity, navigating histories both inherited and self-forged as the poet works to untangle the gnarled roots of race, love, violence, and family.

Told through a Black feminist lens, the collection explores the ways we learn to survive what attempts to undo us, and how we come into our own power in the process. With a voice that is clear-eyed, assured, and deeply attentive, The Body Losing Its Borders charts the ongoing work of becoming: not despite the world’s pressures, but through them.

In a trilingual collection—presented in Nahuatl, Spanish, and English—Joaquín Zihuatanejo unflinchingly captures the duality of immigrant experiences in the United States.

Picking up where his previous collection, Occupy Whiteness, left off, Immigrant pays homage to the languages of Zihuatanejo’s lineage: the Nahuatl his grandfather’s grandfather spoke in, the Spanish his abuelo prayed in, and the English he himself writes in today. Sometimes brutal, always honest, these poems of witness explore what it means to cross over—and to be double-crossed.

Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

“Lyrical, beautiful, and descriptive.” ―Mandana Chaffa, BOMB

“In ravishing, formally exploratory poems, Maya C. Popa wields the lyric like a reparative scalpel, evoking wonder and woundedness in equal measure.” ―Meghan O’Rourke

Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection. Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?

Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers―John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust―to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.

A New York Times Editors’ Choice book from the author of the award-winning Tap Out – “a gritty, insightful debut” (Washington Post) – Edgar Kunz’s second poetry collection propels the reader across the shifting terrain of late-capitalist America. 

 Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet’s estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.

WINNER OF THE 2025 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD FROM THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

A stunning new collection exploring lineage and the legacy of survival as seen through the life of the poet’s grandmother Alice—a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South—using the King James Bible as a narrative framework.

“Alice / a god-song, swings still in the high / branch of our throats. I miss her, wonder / what she plants in heaven’s mulch.”

When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice, she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text.

In Ghost Woman, Crystal Simone Smith explores the long and deep connections between nature, personhood, ancestry, and trauma through haiku and haibun. Separated into five sections, the poems emphasize the way social bonds and landscapes are reflected in and through the environment. Smith brings her experiences with race, motherhood, and poetry into conversation with the five elements, Wind (Fu), Earth (Chi), Water (Sui), Fire (Ka), and Void (Ku) to take readers through an introspective haiku journey, an exploration of the nature of the self as well as the nature of the broader world. Balancing shattering grief with ordinary moments of love and trauma with survival, Ghost Woman weaves a narrative verse of single motherhood, bearing witness, and carrying your history with you. The poems in Ghost Woman invite the reader to be with nature and themselves more intentionally.

The 40th anniversary edition of a celebrated poetry anthology, with selections from the work of twenty poets ranging from Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani to Naomi Shihab Nye, Etel Adnan, and more.

Arab American poetry is an especially rich, people-involved, passionate literature that has been spawned, at least until recently, in isolation from the

American mainstream. This highly-praised anthology reflects the renaissance in the literature of what may be the latest ethnic community to assert itself. Twenty poets are represented in this collection. The editors include a brief biography of each poet, together with a selection of each poet’s work. The short bios offer fascinating glimpses into Arab American literary history.

It starts with Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani and includes celebrated contemporaries who write in Arabic or English or both. Contributors include:

Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, Jamil Holway, Mikhail Naimy, Elia Abu Madi, Etel Adnan, Naomi Shihab Nye, D.H. Melhem, Samuel Hazo, Joseph Awad, Eugene Paul Nasser, H.S. (Sam) Hamod, Jack Marshall, Fawaz Turki, Doris Safie, Ben Bennani, Sharif Elmusa, Lawrence Joseph, Gregory Orfalea, and Elmaz Abinader.

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.

Misael Osorio-Conde’s debut collection some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo unos Fragmentos center cultural, psychological, and linguistic border-crossings. Osorio-Conde's poems chart the experiences of his formative years where he learned to live in the shadows of exile as well as within a new language. Threading the needle between disclosure and acceptance, lyricism and narrative, and encapsulating new and inventive formal structures, the poems in some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo unos Fragmentos attempt to make sense of Osorio-Conde’s crossing while grieving an indefinitely deferred return to his native land. The poems presented in this bilingual collection are built for our contemporary moment, while laced with the timeless realities, hardships, and most importantly, the successes, loves, family, and camaraderie that define human experience.

An inspirational keepsake from the multiple award-winning writer and activist

Dynamic and legendary, poet and activist Sonia Sanchez is one of the most esteemed poets in contemporary American literature. Now for her fans and new readers alike comes this giftable quote book, containing some of her most powerful writing from her previously published volumes and in an attractive, paper-over-board package.

With nearly 40 verses and quotations, this collection explores themes of love, resistance, and social justice. Sample excerpts include:

On love: “your hands/humming hurricanes of beauty.”

On resistance: "I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people.”

On social justice: "...if we the people work, organize, resist,
come together for peace, racial, social
and sexual justice
it'll get better
it'll get better.”

A prominent member of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and a pioneer in education, Sanchez’s career has spanned decades, spawned more than 20 books and countless other writings, with Sanchez herself receiving numerous accolades and awards. Carefully selected to inspire, and perfect for casual reading and contemplation, this is the ideal gift for fans and new readers alike.

A lyrical and biographical reflection on the art and life of Horace H. Pippin—the best-known African American artist of his time—Primitive offers a searching critique of the condescension to African American folk art as supposedly “primitive,” and it also critiques the underestimation of African American life and imagination in the broader American consciousness. Award-winning poet Janice N. Harrington connects readers to this fascinating, odds-defying artist, all while underscoring the human craving for artistic expression.

Afrofuturist poetry that envisions Black people finding new worlds of freedom.

Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one.

YEET! is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Sawako Nakasayu.

Borrowing from Romare Bearden’s aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden’s Odyssey gathers, for the first time, poems from thirty-five of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. Poetic echoes come forth in themes of inspiration with historical intersections of one of the greatest visual artists of the twentieth century.
 
The award-winning editors, Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, assemble an esteemed literary congregation, with original poems by Chris Abani, Rita Dove, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ed Roberson, Aracelis Girmay, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more. With a powerful foreword by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and stunning visual reproductions of select Bearden masterpieces, this anthology fuses art and literature, standing as a testament to Romare Bearden’s power and influence in the contemporary artistic world.

Ignite-Her is a spark. A flame. An inferno.

In 2024, five fierce FEMMEnomenal poets-EbonyRose, Renee Blackwell, Sarahtonin, Skyy Danielle, and Tequila Smith-lit National Poetry Month ablaze with 30 days of original writing prompts and poetry that cracked open the soul. What began as a challenge became HERstory in motion.

This collection is more than ink on pages. It is sacred fire. Each poem was written daily, in real time, rising from the depths of grief, joy, rage, creativity, tenderness, faith, and fierce self-discovery. These women wrote their truths into existence and now they are passing the torch to you.

Inside these pages you'll find prompts designed to break the silence and unleash the stories trapped beneath the surface. You'll encounter poetry that dares to feel, to question, to heal, and to burn beautifully.

Write with vigor. Write with flame. A fire does not apologize for its existence.

Stay IGNITED.

"Sorry I Missed Your Call, I Was Trying To Kill Myself" is a poetry collection about mental health, race, self-love, and cultural identity. Drawing from the personal experience of a Black Woman in America who has long been expected to be strong, these poems explore what happens when that strength begins to crack.

This collection speaks openly about mental health in the Black community, naming the pain and giving a voice to the topics that often go unspoken. This piece is a love letter to every person who has ever felt small, overwhelmed, and othered. Blending the personal and political through poems on heartbreak, self-reflection, and cultural critique, Ewurakua brings the reader on a journey out of survival mode toward softness, healing, and the search for peace.

Toi Derricotte’s story is a hero’s journey―a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. “I”: New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy.It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth.

This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.

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.

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”

“The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.”

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

Through invention and remembrance, a little bump in the earth creates a black town on a hill—its land, its losses, its living and ancestral dead.

Tyree Daye's a little bump in the earth is an act of invention and remembrance. Through sprawling poems, the town of Youngsville, North Carolina, where Daye's family has lived for the last 200 years, is reclaimed as “Ritual House." Here, “every cousin aunt uncle ghost" is welcome. Daye invokes real and imagined people, the ancestral dead, land, snakes, and chickens, to create a black town on a hill. Including dreams, letters, revised rental agreements, and “a little museum in the here & after," where collaged images appear besides documents from Daye's ancestors—census records, marriage licenses, and WWII Draft Registration cards—the collection asks if the past can be a portal to the future, the present a catalyst for the past. a little bump in the earth explores what it means to love someone, someplace, even as it changes, dies right in front of your eyes. Poem by poem, Daye is honoring the people of Youngsville and “bringing back the dead."