Drumroll please… This is a big day for books and writers and readers — this year’s crop of National Book Award finalists is here! Past winners, now considered modern classics of American literature, include Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming), Jesmyn Ward (twice, for Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing), Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown), Elizabeth […]
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry
In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.
perched
i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.
under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.
if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.
—after Alison Saar's Blue Bird
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry
In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.
perched
i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.
under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.
if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.
—after Alison Saar's Blue Bird
![suddenly we](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.10.4)
suddenly we
112![suddenly we](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.10.4)
suddenly we
112eBook
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780819500465 |
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Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
Publication date: | 03/07/2023 |
Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 112 |
File size: | 922 KB |
Age Range: | 18 Years |