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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Homie
Smith (Don't Call Us Dead) presents an electrifying, unabashedly queer ode to friendship and community in their exuberant and mournful second collection. (Publishers Weekly)
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A Fortune for your Disaster
In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. (Publisher description)
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The Tradition
A consummate craftsman, Brown conveys emotional and provocative content through plainspoken yet subtly lyrical forms whose delicacy only heightens the subversive force of his ideas, which can be delivered with unabashed, declarative candor. (Library Journal)
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Chameleon Aura
Zimbabwean poet Billy Chapata provides a thought-provoking take on the universal experiences of love, pain, and what comes next through messages of empowerment. This collection of poetry and prose will justify heartache and inspire the fortitude to survive and prosper. (Publisher description)
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Crossfire
Chin is still uncategorizable, but hardly miscellaneous. Rather, she speaks for and to those on the margins as well as those who are still mustering their voices. (The Adroit Journal)
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Night Angler
Winner of the James Laughlin Award, the second collection from Davis (Revising the Storm) is a tender prayer to the everyday anchored in the experience of fatherhood. Poems that share the title "The Night Angler" emerge in different permutations. (Publishers Weekly)
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And Then I Got Fired
Feel free to scream directly into this book if you need to. It won't judge you, promise! This book gets grief. The good, the bad and the snotty noses. (Publisher description)
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HULL
This first collection by African American poet Xandria Phillips explores the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement and colonization on the Black queer body in urban, rural, and international settings. (Publisher description)
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Kumukanda
Translating as 'initiation', kumukanda is the name given to the rites a young boy from the Luvale tribe must pass through before he is considered a man. The poems of Kayo Chingonyi's remarkable debut explore this passage- between two worlds, ancestral and contemporary; between the living and the dead; between the gulf of who he is and how he is perceived. (Publisher description)
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The January Children
Early in this piercing collection, Elhillo curtly explains, "they called our grandfathers the january children lined up by the colonizer & assigned birth/ years by height." She's describing Sudan under British occupation, and her poems unfold the ongoing consequences of colonization and Sudan's repressive culture today. (Library Journal)
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