Suddenly We
by Evie Shockley
Publication Date: Mar 07, 2023
List Price: $15.95
Format: Paperback, 112 pages
Classification: Poetry
ISBN13: 9780819500458
Imprint: Wesleyan University Press
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Parent Company: Wesleyan University
Evie Shockley’s new poems invite us to dream—and work—toward a more capacious "we"
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
Books similiar to Suddenly We may be found in the categories below:
- Poetry / American / African American & Black
- Poetry / Subjects & Themes / General
- Poetry / Women Authors