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Paperback Suddenly We Book

ISBN: 0819500453

ISBN13: 9780819500458

Suddenly We

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Book Overview

Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream--and work--toward a more capacious "we"

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious "we." How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth.

perched

i am black, comely,
a girl on the cusp of desire.
my dangling toes take the rest
the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,
my pose proposes anticipation. i poise
in copper-colored tension, intent on
manifesting my soul in the discouraging world.

under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen.

if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alive
with change. inside me, a love of beauty rises
like sap, sprouts from my scalp
and stretches forth. i send out my song, an aria
blue and feathered, and grow toward it,
choirs bare, but soon to bud. i am
black and becoming.

--after Alison Saar's
Blue Bird

Related Subjects

Poetry

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suddenly we Mentions in Our Blog

suddenly we in 2023 National Book Awards Longlist
2023 National Book Awards Longlist
Published by Amanda Cleveland • September 17, 2023
Presented by the National Book Foundation, the National Book Awards celebrate the best writing in America. Every year, a winner is chosen in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literature in translation, and young people’s literature from 10 finalists. Here are this year’s nominated titles.
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