Perfect Black

Perfect Black is the long-awaited first poetry volume from the acclaimed Affrilachian novelist, Crystal Wilkinson. Collecting poems that were written across two decades, Perfect Black tells the story of one woman’s Kentucky life, a hymn to how Wilkinson emerged from a rural girlhood to build a transformative legacy of activism and artistry. As the poet remembers and survives traumas like sexual assault, mother-loss, and racism, she also reminds the reader that by staying close to her roots, and the land in which they grow, a woman can learn how to do more than survive, she can come out singing, she can thrive. Perfect Black is not just a compelling book of poetry, it is the inspiring memoir-in-verse of the writer who became the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s first African-American woman to be named Poet Laureate.