Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life. Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces. Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.” “The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.” Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

Poetry. In what can be described as a verse-novel for its lyricism and rhythmic structure, Wanda Praamsma crafts a story that transcends geographic boundaries and time periods, by weaving together lives from her own family's past, including her poet-grandfather and sculptor-uncle. Subtle in its life lessons, A THIN LINE BETWEEN works at 'peeling away the I's' to explore concepts of self and family in flux. What emerges is a poignant, and at times humorous, portrait of a Dutch-Canadian family and a close look into a young woman's exploration of her own being and creative life. "Few books are so gracefully themselves: A THIN LINE BETWEEN accomplishes an atmosphere that seems enigmatically familiar, complex and unassuming. It is, in part, an intimate and oblique portrait of a major Dutch poet, but even more so, it's an exploration of how we should live. The doors in this poem lie between inner and outer worlds, family members, places, life and art--and the speaker's curiosity and candour leave them wide open."--Sadiqa de Meijer "Mixing shapes, genre and line break into a multi-layered poem (long poem and dozens of little poems), A THIN LINE BETWEEN is within and without, it opens like a door, and moves through family, love, 'the mysterious he, ' language, and all those other lives we have lived. It conveys the beauty of crafting our own selves, edits and all, and asks the questions: 'What is this place i come from?' 'Where is it i am going?' and most importantly, 'How am i going to write about it?'"--Katherena Vermette "Conversational, associative on many levels, Wanda Praamsma's long poem pulls a reader in to what is both said and unspoken. A THIN LINE BETWEEN probes the dualities of resemblance and difference, here and there, leaving the door of her heart ajar in its testing of interconnections within this highly creative Dutch family."--daphne marlatt "A THIN LINE BETWEEN balances the intimacy of personal narrative and memory with a sweeping meditation on experience and language. By reflecting on the relationship and inherent tensions between 'without' and 'within, ' it locates the hidden pause within even the most fleeting, seemingly ordinary, moments."--Johanna Skibsrud