By Nguyễn Đặng Thiên An ’23
Staff Writer
This week, Mount Holyoke News is highlighting several Black authors who have recent releases in honor of Black History Month. These emerging poets weave history, personal experiences, art and ancestry to craft thoughtful conversations about gender, sexuality and identity. Each of their poems, with unflinching words, opens a discussion about how Black history and experiences have shaped America.
Graphics by Jieru Ye’23
1. “Palm Lined with Potience” by Basie Allen
“Palm Lined with Potience” is a poetry collection about space and art, according to Ugly Duckling Presse. As a New York-based visual artist, Allen’s vivid descriptions balance a space of honesty and humor with eeriness and darkness. While carving out this space, Allen interjects these poems with references to Black poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Richard Wright. An excerpt from Allen’s poetry collection is available on Ugly Duckling Presse’s website. The poetry collection can be preordered and will be ready to ship in March 2022.
Allen is a visual culture artist and poet who has published several poems such as “Psychic Cartography” and “dream knots and badge juice.” In 2020, Allen was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, an award that has honored literary projects in America since 1976.
2. “How to Identify Yourself with a Wound” by KB Brookins
Reviews from KB’s website highlights “How to Identify Yourself with a Wound” as a text that critically refuses the gender binary and raises pressing issues about race. ire’ne laura silva, author of “CUICACALLI/House of Song,” commented that in this work, KB asks, when society perceives certain identities as wounded, “What does it mean to define yourself outside of the pain of being marginalized?”
This debut poetry collection creates a tender space for sharing wounds and promoting healing for the readers and the author. The collection, published in January 2022, won the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize and resonates with the music genres of neo-soul and Afrofuturistic music, according to Sight Line Magazine.
According to the Chicago Review of Books, KB is a queer transmasculine poet, educator and culture worker living in Austin, Texas. Brookin’s LinkedIn page references Interfaces, a community founded in 2019 that curates interdisciplinary arts programs to amplify marginalized artists. They were named a poetry fellow at PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2021.
3. “Already Knew You Were Coming” by Sarah Nnenna Loveth Nwafor
The local publishing house Game Over Books introduces the collection as a tender and compassionate trip. Nwafor takes readers to a magical realm of spiritual forces and nature, featuring characters such as the moon, banshees, Bitterlemon and kola nut. Through conversations among these magical forces and reassurance from ancestors, Nwafor portrays a personal evolution of queer identity and codependence, as reported by Christian Burno of WBUR. “Already Knew You Were Coming” is Nwafor’s debut poetry collection, published locally in January 2022 through the small press Game Over Books.
A Wellesley College graduate, Nwafor is a queer, non-binary Igbo poet. They are currently an educator and facilitator who firmly believes in storytelling and practices the Igbo traditional orature. Their works draw inspiration from Black sapphism, Igbo cosmology, emotional wellness and the power of healing, Electric Marronage cited. In 2018, they were the National Collegiate Poetry Slam Champion.
4. “Muscle Memory” by Kyle Carero Lopez
As featured in Verse’s poetry playlist on Sept. 13t, 2021, Lopez confronts Blackness and anti-Blackness, queerness and violence in this debut poetry collection. Jody Chan, a judge of Pank’s “Little Book” contest, stated that the book demands greater actions “beyond the passive consumption of Black death.” According to Verse, throughout this sincere debut, Lopez’s words echo with Afro-Cuban drumming and disco, and a lot of discussions about displacement and the “Black and Latinx imaginary” are packed into this poetry collection.
Lopez was born to Cuban parents and was a Goldwater Writing Workshop Fellow and Provost’s Global Research Initiative Fellow at NYU Berlin. His poems, such as “Black Erasure” and “Rescuing Abuelo (1967),” have been published in The Atlantic, Cincinnati Review and Bear Review. His poem “After Abolition” was chosen for publication in Best New Poets 2021.