Black Under

by Ashanti Anderson

Overview

Winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition
The poem from which Black Under derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: “ I am black and black underneath.” These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson' s debut short collection. We feel them as we navigate her poems' linguistic risks and shifts and trumpets, as we straddle scales that tip us toward trauma' s still-bloody knife in one turn then into cutting wit and shrewd humor in the next. We hear them amplified through Anderson' s dynamic voice, which sings of anguish and atrocities and also of discovery and beauty.
Black Under layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies— and incongruences— of marginalization and hypervisibility. Anderson torques the contradictions of oppression, giving her speakers the breathing room to discover their own agency. In these pages, declarations are reclamations, and joy is not an aspiration but a birthright.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625571144
Publisher:	Black Lawrence Press
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	30
File size:	176 KB

About the Author

Ashanti Anderson (they/them) is a Black Queer Disabled poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Their debut short poetry collection, Black Under, is the winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Their poems have appeared in World Literature Today, POETRY magazine, and elsewhere in print and on the web. Learn more about Ashanti' s previous and latest shenanigans at ashanticreates.com.

Table of Contents

Ode to Black Skin 1

Career-Changing Opportunity! 5

Self-Portrait as Overseer 7

Busts of the Beheaded 8

Slave Ship Haibun 11

Sister, pick which battle to win when you choose to lose the war 12

The Body Recalls 13

Laughing to the Bank 14

Acrostic for My Last Breaths 15

Answer to an Earnest Prayer 16

Cleaning Up Men's Messes 17

If 19

Self-Portrait in Blackface 20

If No One Is Around, Does This Body Make a Sound? 21

Resignation 22

Acknowledgments 23