For the Girls Who Do Too Much by Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman

[Khadijah]

For the Girls Who Do Too Much is a poignant and powerful collection of poetry by Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman, the 2023 Poet Laureate of Prince George's County, MD. This collection serves as a tribute to the women who take on multiple roles, strive tirelessly, experience profound love, and occasionally lose themselves in the process. Ali-Coleman explores themes of loss, love, aging, work toxicity, mothering, and depression with unwavering honesty and tender introspection. This poetry book follows her debut collection, The Summoning of Black Joy, released in 2023.

The collection explores the complexities of relationships through personal stories and vivid imagery, highlighting the poet's nuanced connection with her late mother, whose life tragically ended in 2014 due to a police cadet's reckless actions. The poems resonate with the universal struggle of balancing personal identity with the demands of daily life, making this collection a must-read for those who find themselves doing too much, too often. 

In For the Girls Who Do Too Much, Ali-Coleman offers a heartfelt exploration of the resilience, vulnerability, and strength that define the experiences of many women today. It is a celebration of the enduring spirit and an invitation to pause, reflect, and reclaim one's own narrative. Learn more here.

 

Praise for For the Girls:

 

Waiting to read this on my flight for my birthday was a gift I didn’t know I needed. Thanks for this beautiful collection.

- Jade Weatherington, Founder of Teacher Jade's Writing Academy

 

The silence survival requires is sometimes deafening, especially if you’re a poet and quite a good one at that. The unsaid has to go somewhere, and, for poet Khadijah Ali-Coleman, it goes into a poem called "Survival Tactics" in her most recent poetry collection, For the Girls Who Do Too Much. It was only after I had absorbed the theme of the poem that I noticed the rhyme scheme of the poem. I read the rhyming words as their own poem, a kind of internal poem-within-the-poem and that made the poem resonate even more.

-Tichaona Chinyelu, author of Contraband Marriage, In the Whirlwind and Still Living on My Feet