(v.) Paperback - 2017

From the publisher

Poetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. In 1974, when Ntozake Shange first released the cannon of Black girl magic known as For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, her opening stanza was a call to all of us.

"somebody/ anybody
sing a black girl's song
bring her out
to know herself ."

This book is answer to that call.

What is sacred, what is beauty, what is tragedy, what rites of passage have we endured to be initiated into the complexities of our humanity? Anastacia-Rene's words frame so many questions, read like ritual, read like nursery rhymes, invoke ancestors and Becky alike in a nuanced honest reflection of this time in life.

Using a reimagined alphabet, Anastacia-Rene sets about taking on everything from love to cancer, monsters, growing up, growing into our bodies, and the ways in which even our bodies are not our own. Her words define and redefine, explore hidden truths and expose the lies we are raised with.

These poems are stories of blackness, of queerness, of womanhood and the combination of all the identities we hold externally and internally that create the tapestry of who we are and who we want to be.