Ten Black Poets to Know
What I'm reading and what you should read too
Good morning beloveds. You’re getting a listicle this week because I am still recovering from birthday festivities. But who doesn’t love a listicle? And if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “gee, Irene’s recommended me so many great poets over the time in which we’ve known each other, I wish I had them all in one centralized location,” well your wish has been granted. This is also a launch of my Bookshop.org affiliate page (where you can find handy links to books I’ve recommended as well as books I’ve edited and contributed to). [Requisite disclaimer: All Bookshop.org links are affiliate, meaning I receive a small payment for any book purchased through them.] If you want to toss me twenty cents or so while you’re buying a great book, I won’t say no.
You know I couldn’t start this list without putting you onto my sisterfriend Ashia Ajani. I’ve known Ashia since I was a freshman and Ashia was a junior and co-president of WORD: PERFORMANCE POETRY AT YALE. Ashia modeled what an expansive and justice-rooted vision of ecopoetics could look like for me well before I realized that’s what I was doing. I love Ashia’s anger (as I type this I’m looking at a card they got me with the Zora Neale Hurston quote “I do not weep for the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife”). I love their audacity. Ashia’s poetry is much like their nails - immaculate, artful, could fuck you up if you’re not careful, and very, very Black.
Where to start: “Roaches Don’t Die (remix)”
Favorite book: Heirloom (Write Bloody Press 2023)
I encountered Karisma’s poetry for the first time in my email inbox in the form of the poets.org “poem-a-day.” Even then, I think I knew I’d be changed forever, or at the very least, that I was no longer quite so alone. Karisma is also from New Orleans, and deftly writes about the long durée of Katrina (among other trials and joys of life in the Crescent City). She’s lyrical and incisive: I see Terrance Hayes in her work (which is not shocking because Karisma is one of the numerous brilliant Black poets coming out of the NYU MFA program right now), I see Lucille Clifton. Go get you some.
Where to start: Castnet Seafood
Favorite book: I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books 2023)
Claudia is probably the most famous poet on this list (the woman has a MacArthur for crying out loud), but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t have survived the Yale English department without Claudia. I took her freshman year Advanced Poetry seminar, then her seminar on Contemporary Black Women Poets, and then she agreed to advise my thesis (the one that became Take Me to the Water) and what a blessing that proved to be. In a school and a department where my poetry was often misunderstood, she reminded me who the fuck I was. I never needed to prove myself to her, but I always wanted her careful eye on the best version of myself and my work. She introduced me to many other poets on this list (through their work and sometimes in real life). I don’t think it’s too sappy to say she didn’t let me be lonely.
Where to start: “I don’t usually talk to strangers…”
Favorite book: Citizen is her most famous book but Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf 2004) is my personal favorite. I think reading it helped me understand why she understood me.
God, I love Morgan Parker. Morgan is one of those poets (like Ariana Brown, who is further down on this list) that I feel so lucky that I came up 6-10 years after so I could always be writing into a world that Morgan Parker’s writing was in first. Did I mention that she’s funny? And so biting? And can wield a pop culture reference in a way that feels necessary rather than a mere bid for applause? You wanna guffaw at a poem, pull up one of hers.
Where to start: “Matt”
Favorite book: Magical Negro (Tin House 2019)
Dionne Brand
The following quote from Dionne Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return was the epigraph on my thesis in ethnic studies: “Dear Eduardo, I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is misled when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo. But if it were a country where you were my compatriot, then I would reconsider. And think of the things we should have to sort out.” ‘Nuff said.
Where to start: “prologue for now - Gaza”
Favorite book: Map to the Door of No Return
Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio. I am a queer Black Mexican American poet from Houston. Ariana came up in the Austin slam scene. I came up in the Houston slam scene. How lucky am I? In a world of diaspora poets who fail to understand the role of anti-Blackness specifically and imperialism more broadly, be an Ariana.
Where to Start: “Invocation”
Favorite book: Sana Sana (Game Over Books 2020)
Evie is one of the most generous poets and people I’ve had the joy of meeting in this life. I was first introduced to her book of literary criticism Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry in Claudia’s sophomore year class (as well as two of her poetry collections), and I’ve since had the pleasure of calling her my teacher and co-panelist. Here’s how she describes herself in an interview with The Dead Mule: “But to answer your question, what I mean when I speak of myself as a ‘southern poet’ is that I grew up: hearing certain accents and vocabularies and speech patterns that were the aural essence of home or the audible signal of danger, depending; thinking that racism wasn’t much of a problem in other parts of the country; eating a cuisine that was originally developed under conditions of make-do and make-last; enjoying five- or six-month summers and getting snow days out of school when the forecast called for nothing other than possible icy conditions; knowing that my region was considered laughable almost everywhere else; assuming there was nothing unusual about finding churches on two out of every four corners; and believing that any six or seven people with vocal chords could produce four-part harmony at the drop of a dime and that all of this informs my poetry, sometimes directly and sometimes in ways that might be unpredictable or illegible.”
Where to start: “black love”
Favorite book: Semiautomatic (Wesleyan University Press 2018)
I waffled about whether or not I should include poets on this list who have achieved certain benchmarks of conventional fame (though, to quote my high school English teacher, there’s no such thing as a famous poet), and Natasha Tretheway was Poet Laureate, but I fear not enough of you have read her work! A brilliant formalist (the sonnet crown in Native Guard is a masterclass)! A gem of the Gulf Coast.
Where to start: “Genus Narcissus”
Favorite book: Native Guard (Ecco 2007)
Lucille Clifton
I have waxed poetic about Lucille Clifton many times in this newsletter. At this moment I am thinking about retitling the entire newsletter after one of her poems “good news about the earth.” A line from one of her poems is the epigraph in Take Me to the Water. I learned a lot about concision from reading her work (as someone that tends to be, shall we say, long-winded). Well before it was popular, she was insisting on the centrality of Black life to the natural world and vice versa. “Being property once myself,” she said, “I have a feeling for it. that's why I can talk about environment.” She watches over all I do.
Where to start: “won’t you celebrate with me”
Favorite book: How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA editions 2021)
Robin Coste Lewis
You know those books you read at exactly the right moment in your life? In the Spring of 2019, Voyage of the Sable Venus was that for me. I was very lonely (brutalized by misrecognition is how I put it in an essay once — a bit dramatic but it felt apt). It was the last book assigned for my Intro to English Poetry II class (a requirement for the major). Robin Coste Lewis’s work showed me that though we were born into a fucked up historical and ongoing condition we could (and indeed should) insist on the viability of the Black femme subject, on the cohabitation of the lyric alongside the more avantgarde language poetry, and in fact, on love.
Where to start: “Plantation”
Favorite book: Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf 2017)
Till next time!
Currently reading: Bluff by Danez Smith
Spinning: “I Can’t Stand the Rain” by Tina Turner