Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Suddenly We

Suddenly We

Shockley, Evie

Paperback

Series: Wesleyan Poetry

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $15.95

ISBN10: 0819500453
ISBN13: 9780819500458
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: Mar 7 2023
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.70 Width: 7.30 Depth: 9.20
Language: English
Awards: National Book Awards, National Book Awards

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

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