From ancient African poems to the work songs of enslaved people and the flood of amazing poetry during the Harlem Renaissance to right now, there’s just so much to read and celebrate from Black poets. Possibly more than any other written art form, poetry is often a form of protesting. Racism around the world is decried over and over in the lines of poetry. The mistreatment of women, of children, and all other injustice humans endure are explored in poetry. Many Black poets have built their entire poetic careers in this form of protest. Other collections of poems give a broader view of the Black experience. Here are 10 new Black poetry books coming out in 2023.
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length collection The Renunciations. Her book Bestiary is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also long-listed for the National Book Award and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Kelly’s Bestiary is a catalog of creatures–from the whale and ostrich to the Pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel. Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection.
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by Aja Monet
Of Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an American contemporary poet, writer, lyricist, and activist based in Los Angeles. At 19, Monet became the youngest winner of Nuyorican Poets Café’s Grand Slam. After graduation, she published two chapbooks: The Black Unicorn Sings (2010) and Inner-City Cyborgs and Ciphers (2014). In 2023, Monet released her debut album, when the poems do what they do, featuring Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Samora Pinderhughes, Marcus Gilmore, Lonnie Holley, My Mother Is a Freedom Fighter is Aja Monet’s ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters—the tiny gods who fight to change the world. Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.
Sonata Mulattica by Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986. Sonata Mulattica is probably Dove’s best and most ambitious work. It’s a collection that blends genres and forms, telling the real-life story of biracial musician George Polgreen Bridgetower as fiction through brilliant poetry and a short play. Dove explores what it means to be filled with so much promise, talent, and divine music, and yet ultimately be sidelined to the shadows. In Dove’s words, the shadow shines, and a complicated man in history is given his voice and his music.
Saltwater Demands a Psalm: Poems by Kweku Abimbola
Born in The Gambia in 1997, Kweku Abimbola earned his MFA in Poetry Writing from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Abimbola is a finalist for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the second-place winner of the Furious Flower 2020 poetry contest. Saltwater Demands a Psalm creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols—pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings—and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life. These poems groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberation’s struggles and triumphs. Abimbola’s poetry invokes the ecstasy and sorrow of saying the names of the departed, of seeing and being seen, of being called and calling back.
No Sweet Without Brine: Poems book by Cynthia Manick
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. For 10 years, she curated Soul Sister Revue, a quarterly reading series that promoted poetry as storytelling and featured emerging poets, poet laureates, and Pulitzer Prize winners. Manick’s latest is a playlist of everyday life, introverted thoughts, familial bonds, and social commentary. No Sweet Without Brine is a reminder that a hint of sorrow makes the celebration and recognition of the glory of Blackness in all ways, and through all people, that much sweeter.
Wade In The Water by Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volumeLife on Mars. Wade in the Water is the first of her three collections to be published in the UK. The title is from a spiritual song on the Underground Railroad that carried slaves to safety in the 19th century. Its centerpiece is a gathering of what is known as “erasure poems” – a strange term as what Smith is doing is the opposite of erasure. She is making visible the words of slaves and their owners, of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War –these are found poems about people who were lost. The collection includes attractive, smaller-scale poems.
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is an American poet and writer. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Tradition questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police. The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery.
Home for Hurricanes by Nikki Murphy
Nikki Murphy is an awarded Diversity & Inclusion Leader, real estate investor, poet and author of her debut poetry collection, Home For Hurricanes: A Memoir of Resilience in Poetry and Prose. As a speaker, Murphy connects with her audience to provide the insight and actionable advice needed to take control of your life and career and make positive changes to truly live your values and achieve success. Abandoned by her hustling father, raised by her devoted mother, and then battered by the winds of loss, heartbreak, and sexual assault, Murphy exposes the undercurrents of resilience and faith that undergird her success in this riveting memoir-in-verse. With each poem shared, readers go on a journey with the author through every setback, disappointment, heartbreak, and traumatic experience she entrusts us with.
A Fire in the Hills: Poems by Afaa M. Weaver
Afaa Michael Weaver, formerly known as Michael S. Weaver, is an American poet, short-story writer, and editor. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, and his honors include a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Foundation, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life.
We Want Our Bodies Back: Poems by Jessica Care Moore
Over the past two decades, Jessica Care Moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women’s creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race. Jessica Care Moore argues that Black women spend their lives building a physical and emotional shelter to protect themselves from misogyny, criminalization, hatred, stereotypes, sexual assault, objectification, patriarchy, and death threats. We Want Our Bodies Back is an exploration—and defiant stance against—these many attacks.
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