Bluest Nude: Poems

by Ama Codjoe

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317551
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	08/10/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	91
Sales rank:	604,600
File size:	998 KB

About the Author

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude. She is also the author of Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Codjoe’s work has twice appeared in TheBest American Poetry. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Blueprint

As I lay on the prickly grass, grasshoppers chattered

in my hair. I stroked the ground like a beard. No one

sang. The whole sky was watching. It’s animal

piss in the dye pot that makes indigo blue. Blue

seeped out of me, but I wanted to forge it myself.

I was obsessed with making. The yellow leaves

browned; the sugar pine needles refused

to shed. I couldn’t get the pigment right, it kept turning

to mud. I had attempted this before, making wine

from another’s body, stamping and stomping

my grape-stained feet. When I rose, I left the print

of a woman behind. I noticed the pear tree, how it gave

without question; I asked anyway, was asking

again, collecting broken seashells and tiny

elephant figurines. I needed a herd of blue.

I soaked black beans for the color they left. My blue

was a habit, a kind of river I stepped into—sometimes

crossed—because it held the sky so perfectly.

I swung the axe. I swam with my arms.

I hammered nails—though crookedly. Timber

was my sacrum, timber were my metatarsals,

timber was my lungs’ pink flesh, timber was my skull.

I was a blueprint, blue on blue, mapless

but for those warm bones and my red heart barking.

—And when I turned without making my skirt

a basket, when I turned from all the fallen

pears, the sky was full of shaking: wet

with river-water. It wasn’t rain that fell—whatever it was

I collected in the cups of my hands. 

 

On Seeing and Being Seen

I don’t like being photographed. When we kissed

at a wedding, the night grew long and luminous.

You unhooked my bra. A photograph

passes for proof, Sontag says, that a given thing

has happened. Or you leaned back to watch

as I eased the straps from my shoulders.

Hooks and eyes. Right now, my breasts

are too tender to be touched. Their breasts

were horrifying, Elizabeth Bishop writes. Tell her

someone wanted to touch them. I am touching

the photograph of my last seduction. It is as slick

as a magazine page, as dark as a street

darkened by rain. When I want to remember

something beautiful, instead of taking

a photograph, I close my eyes.

I watched as you covered my nipple

with your mouth. Desire made you

beautiful. I closed my eyes.

Tonight, I am alone in my tenderness.

There is nothing in my hand except a certain

grasping. In my mind’s eye, I am

stroking your hair with damp fingertips. This is exactly

how it happened. On the lit-up hotel bed,

I remember thinking, My body is a lens

I can look through with my mind.

 

Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima

What if, Betye, instead of a rifle or hand

grenade—I mean, what if after

the loaded gun that takes two hands

to fire, I lay down the splintered broom

and the steel so cold it wets

my cheek? What if I unclench the valleys

of my fist, and lay down

the wailing baby?

Gonna burn the moon in a cast iron skillet.

Gonna climb the men who, when they see my face, turn into stony mountains.

Gonna get out of the kitchen.

Gonna try on my nakedness like a silk kimono.

Gonna find me a lover who eats nothing but pussy.

Let the whites of my eyes roll, roll.

Gonna clench my toes.

Gonna purr beneath my own hand.

Gonna take down my hair.

Try on a crown of crow feathers.

Gonna roam the wide aisles of the peach grove, light dripping off branches like syrup, leaves            brushing the fuzz on my arms.

—You dig?—

Gonna let the juice trickle down my chin.

Gonna smear the sun like war paint across my chest.

Gonna shimmy into a pair of royal blue bell-bottoms.

Gonna trample the far-out thunderclouds, heavy in their lightness.

Watch them slink away.

Gonna grimace. Gonna grin.

Gonna lay down my sword.

Pick up the delicate eggs of my fists.

Gonna jab the face that hovered over mine.

It’s easy to find the lips, surrounded as they are in minstrel black.

Gonna bloody the head of every god, ghost, or swan who has torn into me—pried me open with its             beak.

Gonna catch my breath in a hunting trap.

Gonna lean against the ropes.

Gonna break the nose of mythology.

—Goodnight John-Boy—

Gonna ice my hands in April’s stream.

Gonna scowl and scream and shepherd my hollering into a green pasture.

Gonna mend my annihilations into a white picket fence.

Gonna whip a tornado with my scarlet handkerchief.

Spin myself dizzy as a purple-lipped drunkard.

Gonna lay down, by the riverside, sticky and braless in the golden sand.

Aint gonna study war no more.

Aint gonna study war no more.

Table of Contents

I.

Blueprint                                                                                                                                           

On Seeing and Being Seen                                                                                          

Two Girls Bathing                                                                                                                             

Marigolds of Fire                                                                                                        

Labor                                                                                                                          

Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima                                                 

Diamondback                                                                                                             

“After the __________, I yearned to be reckless. To smash”                                     

Detail from “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima”                          

Primordial Mirror                                                                                                       

Le Sacre du printemps                                                                                                     

“After the __________, I had the urge to dance”                                                                                                                                                                                          

II.

She Said                                                                                                                                  

 

III.

Posing Nude                                                                                                               

Burying Seeds

At the Fish House

Why I Left the Garden

“After the __________, I mothered my mother”                                                                   

Facing Off                                                                                                                  

“After the __________, time turned like a mood ring.”                                             

Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds                                                                     

Of Being in Motion                                                                                                    

 “After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands”                                         

Heaven as Olympic Spa                                                                                              

 

IV.

Bluest Nude                                                                                                                

Bathers with a Turtle                                                                                                              

Slow Drag with Branches of Pine                                                                               

Lotioning My Mother’s Back                                                                                      

Aubade                                                                                                                       

A Family Woven Like Night through Trees                                                                

Etymology of a Mood                                                                                                 

Poem After an Iteration of a Painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Destroyed by the Artist Herself

Head on Ice #5                                                                                                          

After a Year of Forgetting                                                                                          

“There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed”                                           

 

Notes

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Bluest Nude

“In this frequently gripping debut, Codjoe offers precisely crafted poems dealing with desire, memory, art, and ancestry.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review 

“Fiercely intelligent and both emotionally and formally rich.”—Library Journal

"The hotly burning poems in Codjoe’s debut collection collapse themes of color and body into a lyrical supernova.”—Booklist, starred review

"Bluest Nude is a heady mix of ekphrastic and archival poems…Codjoe conjures the unmistakable textures of Black Americana."—Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation

“If seeing were easy, we wouldn’t need poetry. That’s one of the implications of Ama Codjoe’s startling debut, Bluest Nude. The poems are portraits—glimpses—of a poet who wants ‘to be seen clearly or not at all.’... [Bluest Nude is] steeped brilliantly in the urgency of the contemporary hunger to know what we really are. There’s a quiet joy possible, too, in that difficult pursuit.”—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney’s

“Bluest Nude insists on the personal. Codjoe’s ‘I’ is vibrant and alive, clear in its existence as an individuated lens. Wonderfully, this foregrounding of the first-person does not prohibit a sense of a collective, but rather enforces it.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Bluest Nude is a portrait of Black female desire and embodied love that will leave you closer to your own core. Codjoe uses a language so emotionally clear and nourishing that I felt physically hungry for it.”—The Common

“Bluest Nude is a sensual, seductive, and luminous collection of poetry that draws the reader in with tenderness, vulnerability, and desire. These poems simultaneously satisfy while leaving you with an aching need for more.”—Christine Bollow, Between Drafts

"How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze. In appetite and loss, rage and praise, what animates these poems is a profound cherishing, an abiding (and yet at every turn surprising) love rushing out from the lush wilderness of Ama Codjoe's rapturous imagination. Bluest Nude is an ecstatic encounter."—Tracy K. Smith

"Sensual, sound-driven, and brimming with a necessary truth, the poems in Bluest Nude are pulsating with both grief and beauty. Wrought out of resurrection and reclaiming, these brilliant poems honor the mystery and legacy of the body. Codjoe has written a true triumph of a debut that feels urgent and deeply human."—Ada Limon

"It is hard to find words for the fineness of Ama Codjoe's poetry, its unabashed and luminous vibrancy. She unframes old myths about beauty and femininity and care to bring them intimately into the experience of the body where she forges far more supple visions. Her language is so rich and resourceful that, as it enlarges lyric possibilities, it also enlarges human ones. Never have I been so convinced that the desire to know oneself and the desire to be the agent of one's own radical self-making can be audacious and brilliant collaborators."—Mary Szybist

“Codjoe’s poems made me ache in the best way. These poems call forward our many mothers—in pictures and pages—they create a vibrant salon pulsing with the confidence of a poet’s urgent, material response. Exquisitely balanced between premonition and memory, Bluest Nude is a gathering and conjuring of improvisation and reflection, sensuality and joy, call and response.”—Ellen Gallagher

Praise for Ama Codjoe

"Yes, listen. Listen. Ama Codjoe’s writing is too eloquent not the hear.”—Ed Roberson, from the introduction to Blood of the Air

“At the heart of Codjoe’s poems in her first chapbook, Blood of the Air, is a real heart, pumping, working the blood of life—good blood, bad blood—out. . . . Codjoe’s poems, her re-framings, are full of care and kindness for the speakers of the poems, imagined or not, in their reveries, in their vulnerabilities, in their angers. The quieter poems press your hand with such intention when they skip—never a surprise CD skip from an accidental scratch; a practiced boxer’s skip.”—Adroit Journal

“Codjoe’s poetry offers a brief, powerful intersection where the subjects of her poems illustrate how some issues recur again and again throughout the human experience. In times like these, when blood and air are porous elements that we fear, we see how they are ancient and necessary, too.”—Tara Betts

“ Codjoe’s extraordinary debut poetry chapbook, Blood of the Air, conveys a sense of urgency, vulnerability, and Codjoe’s mastery of the poetic craft. . . . Blood of the Air explores narratives of women and women figures who have lived, lost, resisted, been subject to breaking and other people’s definitions, and who have reclaimed their breaths and freedom.”—Nadia Alexis

From the Publisher

08/01/2022

"They are composites of photographs, magazine cut-outs, and the occasional life drawing." This line is perhaps as instructive as any to the particular character of Codjoe's first full-length collection of poetry. Not only is she recalling the work of another female artist—an act that proves one of the collection's essential cores, particularly Black women artists across a collection of mediums—but she speaks to the composite nature of her own collection. Here are brief portraits of women, gazing or being gazed upon, creating art or simply existing, shrouded, or, as the title suggests, naked—literally, figuratively, psychologically. It's also a work of careful, exquisite precision: it's no accident that the poem immediately following this reference to "cut-outs" is both a thematic and linguistic continuation: "She wasn't cut out to be a housewife…/ She wasn't cut out to be a soccer mom…/ Her hands were cold." Yet elsewhere, Codjoe captures the unsettled nature of our most emotional worlds: "It was a Saturday or Sunday in November or July." VERDICT The collection's organizing principle can feel a bit injudicious at times, with some poems easily bleeding into the next while others feel like slamming into a wall, but the potency of Codjoe's language and keenness of her thematic renderings never fails to enthrall. Fiercely intelligent and both emotionally and formally rich.—Luke Gorham

Library Journal