Black Diasporic Poets
Celebrate poets of the Black/African Diaspora with these collections selected by a librarian at The Seattle Public Library. (created March 2024)
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Thick With Trouble
[P]oet Amber McBride interrogates if being “trouble”—difficult, unruly, powerful, defiant—is ultimately a weakness or an incomparable source of strength. Steeped in the hoodoo spiritual tradition and organized via reimagined tarot cards, this collection becomes a chorus of unapologetic women who laugh, cry, mesmerize, and bring outsiders to their knees. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
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This Is the Honey
In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout... this essential collection contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Chrome Valley
Acclaimed poet Browne explores the joy, pain, and power of Black womanhood in this exceptional collection. The individual poems are brief and often deeply personal, and themes of faith, family, generational trauma, coming-of-age, and independence figure prominently. (Library Journal)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Daughter
An introspective exploration of growth, healing, forgiveness, and self-love, Ebonee Davis's debut collection is a must-read for anyone and everyone having a uniquely human experience in an ever-devolving world. (Publisher description)
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Golden Ax
Cortez maps untrodden historical and speculative terrain in poems of stunning breadth and intimacy in this exquisite debut. Cortez, whose family moved from Louisiana to Utah following Reconstruction, coins the terms Afropioneerism and Afrofrontierism, apt expressions for the poetic ground she covers. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Gossypiin
A Black feminist hypertext that registers the feeling of an experience of the world in which the self is an unstable plurality continuously unmade. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
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Alive at the End of the World
In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us. (NoveList)
Format: Book
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Best Barbarian
The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf’s Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. (Publisher description).
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Stead.fast.sad.ness
"this collection, stead.fast.sad.ness, is meant to be about uncomfortable pain, devastating narratives; that only. utter.truth & some light, a lot of darkness too, this is my story, my analytical metamorphism of becoming me, ameleword, known to you by am(elu), sunnisadgirl.z learnin' how to breathe. to speak. to scream. i'm gonna fucking... sCrEam.]" (Back cover copy)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Bless the Daughter Raised by A Voice in Her Head
With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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