In the past half year Kaveh Akbar’ proclamation that it’s a golden age of poetry has become frequently repeated and a quick look at books by poets of color to be published in 2018 bolster that truth. Here’s the Spring 2018 books.
Will update as publishers add preorder/order links.
Strut, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s second book of poetry, emerges from an intense engagement with our historical moment. These poems are just as much about injustice, struggle, and survival as they are about transcendence and love. Readers will find themselves immersed in the intersections that connect climate change, capitalism, genocide, racism, misogyny, and mental illness. This work honors the gorgeousness of life, even while bearing witness to the ugliness that accompanies—and often seems to permeate—the human experience. Strut is a celebration of self-acceptance, ancestry, love, sensuality, and resilience. It’s not a book of answers, but a blessed, influenced weaving together of shadow and light.
The limited-edition box set is an annual project started in 2014 to ensure the publication of up to a dozen chapbooks by African poets through Akashic Books. The series seeks to identify the best poetry written by African poets working today, and it is especially interested in featuring poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.
The eleven poets included in this box set are: Leila Chatti, Saddiq Dzukogi, Amanda Holiday, Omotara James, Yalie Kamara, Rasaq Malik, Umniya Najaer, Kechi Nomu, Romeo Oriogun, Henk Rossouw, and Alexis Teyie.
DiVida: divided; DiVida: of life" The imaginary character who carries the name and sings her life is both DiVida and Sapphire, who sometimes replies to her musings, as one voice speaking for a universe of black women. Like syncopated masks, the voices of Hand’s book offer a new sense of double-consciousness. Her untimely death at the zenith of her career lends the last few poems, which anticipate death, a special fullness and poignancy. (Marilyn Nelson)
Cave Canem presents the best African American poetry, featuring over 200 popular and critically acclaimed Cave Canem poets including Paul Beatty, Claudia Rankine, Willie Perdomo, Tracy K. Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Terrance Haynes, among others … . Highlighting Cave Canem’s indelible impact on the American poetry scene, The Beautiful, Needful Thing will contain selections from Cave Canem poets who have published a book and/or won prestigious awards […]
Contributors include: Elizabeth Alexander, Paul Beatty, Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, Kevin Young, Major Jackson, Nikky Finney Tyehimba Jess, Willie Perdomo, Patricia Smith, Natasha Tretheway, Afaa M. Weaver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tim Seibles, Vievee Frances, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Greg Pardlo, Jericho Brown, A. Van Jordan, Sharan Strange, Carl Phillips, Rita Dove, Harryette Mullen, Marilyn Nelson, Lucillie Clifton, Michael S. Harper, Kyle Dargan, Camille T. Dungy, Dawn Lundy Martin, Reginal Dwayne Betts, Tara Betts, Mahogany Brown, CM Burroughs, Eisa Davis, and Ross Gay among others.
if i do not carefully open my jars / i will overspill / and lose myself
Across regions and time, the Mayan moon goddess saw many permutations; all versions of her myth featured suffering to a high degree. Common among most was her selection of the sun as a partner leading to swift destruction. The murdered deity’s remains were collected in a series of jars, a dozen of which contained blood, disease, or vermin. Their contents left a poisonous trail around the world, but the final vessel opened to reveal a moon reborn. Still, her celestial obligations were not free of hurt. To provide man time for sleeping, the sun extracted one of her eyes to dim her brilliance. Eclipses were the result of an ongoing quarrel between the two giants due to the moon’s deceptive nature. Certain groups saw her as erratic, promiscuous, incomprehensible, and so on.
In Thirteen Jars: How Xt’actani Learned to Speak, Ashley Miranda places the tormented idol against a backdrop of modern womanhood to explore themes of consent, trauma, gender, and sex. Repurposing oceanic imagery and reproductive themes among other devices, Miranda crafts a new rendition of Xt’actani’s ordeal and calls attention to the unseen wounds concealed in so many jars today. Her allegory exposes a contemporary culture scarcely more progressive than the ancient Maya in its attitudes toward women, a world in which “hysteria is a symptom of incurable need to be more / than just a sex device.”
For Jasminne Méndez, pericardial effusion and pericarditis are not just an abnormal accumulation of fluid and increased inflammation around the heart. It s what happens when you stifle the tears and pain of a miscarriage, infertility and chronic illness for so long that your heart does the crying for you until it begins to drown because its tears have nowhere to go.
Diagnosed with scleroderma at 22 and lupus just six years later, her life becomes a roller coaster of doctor visits, medical tests and procedures. Staring at EKG results that look like hieroglyphics, she realizes that she doesn t want to understand them: The language of a life lived with chronic illness is not something I want to adapt to. I cannot let this hostile vocabulary hijack my story.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Méndez fought for independence against her overly-protective parents, obtaining a full scholarship to college, a dream job after school and a master s degree shortly thereafter. But the full-time job with medical insurance doesn t satisfy her urge to write and perform, so she leaves it in search of creative fulfillment. In this stirring collection of personal essays and poetry, Méndez shares her story, writing about encounters with the medical establishment, experiences as an Afro Latina and longing for the life she expected but that eludes her.
What strikes me most about Spells For Black Wizards is the way Candace Williams chooses to honor the living—not just the people, but the space and the way she lives in it. “I turn off all the lights / and I’m still black” manages to give both a familiar warmth, and a familiar chill. I not only find myself alive in this book, but also I find the people who might be my people doing more than just becoming ghosts. The landscape that might be my landscape, complex in its joys and violences. There is a comfort in seeing yourself or your mother or your lovers or your past or your future echoed back to you, no matter how many times it is done. In Spells For Black Wizards, Candace Williams does it well, in new and exciting ways. I read this book, and I find a place to rest comfortably. Not safe from the world outside, but at home with my people nonetheless. (Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib)
Celina Su’s anti-imperial glossaries and roving dérives seem to evoke a radically different kind of civic engagement. “The physical sensation called homecoming” is diffused across the content of these investigative, self-implicating poems. Su foregrounds the imperial wages of the journalistic or anecdotal travel poem; the geographic sweep of her writing and its historical excavations justifies the otherwise frequently astonishing poetry as a political means, an intuitive conduction between otherwise disparate facts and places. “Between points A and B” obtains a lyric solidarity, and I thrill to that prospect. (Cam Scott, McNally Jackson’s)
Performer, poet, activist, professor: Pamela Sneed has been a striking and indelible force on multiple art scenes for decades. Sweet Dreams invites us to know more about Pamela on her own terms, in her own words. It’s a compact but comprehensive account into life as she sees it: bodacious, revolutionary, worth fighting for. I imagine this book a lifeline for many on the margins. Speaking one’s truth can be a revolutionary act. (Tracie Morris)
In this exquisite debut collection, longing twins with inheritance to consider the interiority of nationhood and the legacy of masculinity and exile. Castillo’s finely-honed poems celebrate and reveal the contours of physical and historical intimacies, a feast for the eyes and heart. (Carmen Giménez Smith)
Nothing is Okay is the second full-length poetry collection by Rachel Wiley, whose work simultaneously deconstructs the lies that we were taught about our bodies and our beings, and builds new ways of viewing ourselves. As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds these topics into a punching critique of culture and a celebration of self. A fat positive activist, Wiley’s work soars and challenges the bounds of bodies and hearts, and the ways we carry them.
