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Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic edited by Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, and Jamila Woods is a fantastic collection of poetry. From Justice Ameer’s “My Beauty” to Lauren Whitehead’s “Outside my Harlem Window” to “Sonnet (47)” by Nikki Wallschlaeger, from Eve Ewing to Noname to Morgan Parker, there are so many fantastic poems in this collection. It’s a highly recommended reads.
Real Change
I believe with my whole self: ain't no room for a Black woman's voice to be policed. Our worth is always up for debate.
Mahogany L. Brown in the Introduction to “The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic”
All summer was one wet weapon after another: barb of sweetgum in the ankle, stranger's knife blade, the wasp stuck in your sneaker.
Michael Mlekoday, “Self-Portrait with Gunshot Vernacular,” from The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop
Signed Saturday
“Yeah, the bad days may come, the lover may leave, the winter may not—hey, the map of your palms, the temple you be, you’re all that you got...Woke up this morning with my mind set on loving me.” The songs and poetic lines of Jamila Woods make up my entire self-care playlist. So I was pleased to see her in conversation with Morgan Parker in 2019. She was kind enough to sign my copy of the brilliant collection Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic—she was one of three editors, alongside Mahogany L. Browne and Idrissa Simmonds.
Signed Saturdays is a weekly series at While Reading and Walking. I’m an avid book collector, and each Saturday, I’ll tell the story of one of my signed books. Feel free to join in at #SignedSaturdays.
T sends me a text about being hard to love and I want to cry. Such a folktale: being hard to love. We are so easy to love. Our resilience and expansion is proof that magic exists. We are magic. We are Black girls grown into women, growing men and women....
Mahogany L. Brown in Introduction to “Breakbeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic”
A beautiful day in Chicago that speaks of upcoming autumn as I walk and read with poetry. ✨✨✨
Two Mini Poetry Reviews
Patricia Frazier is the National Youth Poet Laureate, and her poetry absolutely sears in Graphite, a chapbook and ode to her grandmother and the Ida B. Wells Projects. It’s stunning, unflinching, and a love letter to family in all its good and bad. “Englewood Teaches a Lesson in Pronunciation” attacks the way that those outside see the neighborhood, judge it, prejudice against it, disrespect it. “My Gay-Ass Poem” made me want to yell, in all the best ways. Frazier is a voice that has so much still to give Chicago and the nation.
I’ve heard H. Melt read before and am continually and always impressed. Their poetry in On My Way to Liberation brings the quiet anger that trans people must face everyday, the self-affirmation, the frustration at erasure. Through their poetry, Melt explores a cis world that has so many nonconforming bodies hidden within it, being misgendered, struggling to fit. “Trans People Don’t Want to be Your Friend” begins “25% of americans / don’t want to be friends / with a trans person / 100% of trans people / don’t want to be / your friend” and ends “all I want is a love / that doesn’t end / in a headline.”
