9 Books Published by Button Poetry on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is the third installment of the Rudy Francisco poetry collection. With every book, the author utilizes various tools and methods to excavate his experiences and find poetry in everyday things. Rudy believes that poetry can be found in our immediate surroundings at any given moment and poignantly includes this idea as the foundation of his work.

In this book, Rudy Francisco bravely explores poetic forms such as the contrapuntal, golden shovel and the ode, while offering explanations and his approach to using the aforementioned. Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is meant to inspire its readers, expose them to different avenues of approaching the act of writing poetry and invites them to try it for themselves. Francisco takes the nuances of the craft that feel esoteric and breaks them down so the average person can engage and enjoy poetry in ways that feel familiar.

The author uses this book to further explore subjects such as love, heartbreak, identity and healing. Rudy takes feelings, turns them into vehicles that tell stories, exhibits how multifaceted the human experience is and how connected all of us actually are.

Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky is insightful, commanding but also comforting in a myriad of ways.

A Peculiar People creates an entire microcosm within these poems. Steven Willis crafts a cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, & underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and screenwriting elements to allow the reader to view this social commentary with a fresh lens. This collection examines the author’s life experience; the pain of being Black and facing systemic racism.

Alternate Cover Limited Edition!

Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy’s poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race, and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy’s work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.

2023 Midwest Book Awards Finalist
2021 Feathered Quill Book Awards Bronze Medal Winner
2021 Goodreads Choice Awards - Nominee

Language so often fails us.

In his highly anticipated follow up to Helium, Francisco has created his own words for the things we cannot give name to.

English is the shiniest hammer
I own, but it's also
the only thing in my toolbox.

Nolexi noun
no-lex-i nō-lek-si
Definition of nolexi:
1: a word or phrase that does not exist or has no direct translation in a particular language

I'll Fly Away uses Francisco's invented lexicon as the palette to paint an intimate portrait of Black life in America — one that praises joy and grace without shying away from the hard truths confronting all of us today.

Porsha Olayiwola’s debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance.

These poems dip their hands into the fabric of Black womanhood and revel in it. i shimmer sometimes, too establishes Olayiwola firmly in the lineage of Black queer poetics, celebrating the work done by generations of poets from Audre Lorde to Danez Smith.

Each poem is a gentle breaking and an inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self and community-care—in pursuit of building a world that will not only keep you alive but will keep you joyful.

Advance Praise for i shimmer sometimes, too

In Porsha Olayiwola’s capable hands, language becomes elastic, becomes kaleidoscopic. i shimmer sometimes, too is cinematic, is magic, and graceful education in the possibilities of form.
—Safia Elhillo, Author of The January Children

In language that is both pungent and poignant, Porsha Olayiwola plumbs a diaspora of resilience, rich in ringshouts and inner-city blues chanted to the sky. i shimmer sometimes, too is luminous indeed.
—Jabari Asim, Author of We Can’t Breathe

Each poem is a lesson, a story, a mirror that Olayiwola holds up to ensure we pay attention to that which we may have overlooked.
—Clint Smith, Author of Counting Descent

2018 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist

Helium is the debut poetry collection by internet phenom Rudy Francisco, whose work has defined poetry for a generation of new readers. Rudy’s poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy’s work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib’s first full-length collection, is a sharp and vulnerable portrayal of city life in the United States. A regular columnist for MTV.com, Abdurraqib brings his interest in pop culture to these poems, analyzing race, gender, family, and the love that finally holds us together even as it threatens to break us. Terrance Hayes writes that Abdurraqib "bridges the bravado and bling of praise with the blood and tears of elegy." The poems in this collection are challenging and accessible at once, as they seek to render real human voices in moments of tragedy and celebration.

"These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make ’a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.’ That’s no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith’s way?saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."?Marcus Wicker "Danez Smith’s BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America."?Rain Taxi

Poetry. African American Studies. "Acclaimed poet Mahogany L. Browne triumphs again with her latest poetry collection SMUDGE, a powerful, intimate, and complex portrait of a girl who deserves more than what she is given: a world in which our hero is both painfully invisible and vulnerably exposed. Browne masterfully invites us into this girl’s life with language that is evocative, nuanced and immediate. The result is a book that is incredibly present. You live each moment presented in the book as if it were your own, and feel deeply the girl’s fears and her humiliations, her hopeful trust and blind love, her shifting sense of safety and self. But despite the honest and harrowing heartbreak that finds its way into the girl, the book nonetheless has a defiant beauty, a strength of character and self that willfully defies the limits others attempt to put on this girl. Browne continues her tradition of creating rich, unflinching, and unapologetic work cataloguing the world as she sees it, and SMUDGE sees her at the top of her game." Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, NEA Poetry Fellow & author of The Year of No Mistakes"