“Sharp as a set of teeth, illuminating like a bullet hole in a window, Aziza Barnes is a daring and vital voice. Her poems have that rare combination of inviting you in while rewarding you for revisiting her words. She is a poet who understands that writing is bloody and poetry is missed punches in dreamtime. Read these poems and look at her go.” —Bao Phi, author of Song I Sing

Poetry. African & African American Studies. "Incandescent in her brutality & neon truth, Aziza Barnes writes her way into an urgent Black, wide & beautiful in its scream. You will find lightning here. You will discover a bruised constellation exploding in a vast black body. Her syllables devour the sweet hurt & harm of their own naked limbs & offer us a generous feast. Aziza Barnes is her own revolution, her own galactic orbit & oracle. She writes, 'In my own home I attempt nightly/to eat my body alive.' These poems suck their teeth & know their own desperate bones. She grieves, 'i done walked with a name i couldn't shake & now i gone.' Shaped and forged in powerful consciousness, Aziza Barnes possesses a gifted voice that will always be needed and necessary. The poems of this extraordinary debut sweat themselves Black with imagination and desire. In I BE, BUT I AIN'T, Barnes achieves both freedom & forgiveness in an ache that persists infinitely in its intelligence & intuition. Listen to her: 'I am ungloved in a sabbath of spit.'"--Rachel Eliza Griffiths "Aziza Barnes's I BE, BUT I AIN'T is a powerful debut that refuses to stroke you soft or angle to be your best friend. Instead, these poems revel in the menagerie of their own discomfort, and ours. Barnes's is a wild imagination and her poems an ill grammar akin to Jayne Cortez's percussive surrealism of the body. Want a lolly pop? You won't get that here. Her poetic is challenging and sophisticated, in a language that refuses to assuage."--Dawn Lundy Martin

When shit goes down, your girls show up. Waking up to a shocking and personal health scare, Octavia and her best friends, June and Imani, go on a crusade to find intimacy and joy in a world that could give a fuck less about them or their feelings. This 24-hour blitz explores what it is to be a queer blk woman in 2015 New York, how we survive and save ourselves from ourselves.

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

We Slept Here is a case study in vulnerability and honesty. In this sequence of memoir-esque poems, Sierra DeMulder pulls at the threads of a past abusive relationship and the long road to forgiveness. The poems themselves become that which was taken from her. These are hard poems, made up of clarity and healing, which attempt to share some of their peace with the world.

One part mixtape, one part disorientation guide, and one part career retrospective, Kyle "Guante" Tran Myhre's debut looks you directly in the eye and doesn't let you flinch. Ranging from justice to love, community action to personal reflection, A Love Song, A Death Rattle, A Battle Cry is a dedication to craft. Clocking in before the rest of us are even awake, the book wastes no time. It does the work and beckons you to follow. A compilation of poems, lyrics and essays from the UN presenter, MC, and two-time National Poetry Slam champion, this book is a love song tucked into a grenade, a necessary call that demands a response.

Still Can't Do My Daughter's Hair is the latest book by author William Evans, founder of Black Nerd Problems. Evans is a long-standing voice in the performance poetry scene, who has performed at venues across the country and been featured on numerous final stages, including the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam. Evans's commanding, confident style shines through in these poems, which explore masculinity, fatherhood, and family, and what it means to make a home as a black man in contemporary America.

One of the most original performance poets of her generation, Melissa Lozada-Oliva has captivated crowds across the country and online with her vivid narratives. Humorous and biting, personal and communal, self-deprecating and unapologetically self-loving, peluda (meaning “hairy” or “hairy beast”) is the poet at her best. The book explores the relationship between femininity and body hair as well as the intersections of family, class, the immigrant experience, Latina identity, and much more, all through Lozada-Oliva’s unique lens and striking voice. Peluda is a powerful testimony on body image and the triumph over taboo.

Nothing is Okay is the second full-length poetry collection by Rachel Wiley, whose work simultaneously deconstructs the lies that we were taught about our bodies and our beings, and builds new ways of viewing ourselves. As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds these topics into a punching critique of culture and a celebration of self. A fat positive activist, Wiley's work soars and challenges the bounds of bodies and hearts, and the ways we carry them.

Neil Hilborn's highly anticipated second collection of poems, The Future, invites readers to find comfort in hard nights and better days. Filled with nostalgia, love, heartbreak, and the author's signature wry examinations of mental health, this book helps explain what lives inside us, what we struggle to define. Written on the road over two years of touring, The Future is rugged, genuine, and relatable. Grabbing attention like gravity, Hilborn reminds readers that no matter how far away we get, we eventually all drift back together. These poems are fireworks for the numb. In the author's own words, The Future is a blue sky and a full tank of gas, and in it, we are alive.