the new black [Paperback]

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (2012)

Smart, grounded, and lyrical, Evie Shockley’s the new black integrates powerful ideas about “blackness,” past and present, through the medium of beautifully crafted verse. the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago—for example, the election of an African American president—will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades—changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to “laugh to keep from crying.” They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures. Check for the online reader’s companion at http://http://thenewblack.site.wesleyan.edu.A profound and uplifting meditation on the meanings of race and belonging in Americamy last modernist poem, # 4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)
OUT WITH THE OLD
my life as china
from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass
celestial
mesostics from the american grammar book
statistical haiku (or, how do they discount us? let me count the ways)
good night women (or, defying the carcinogenic pen)
her tin skin
pink-think (a primer for girls of other colors)
clare’s song
a sonnet for stanley tookie williams
in a non-subjunctive mood
where’s carolina?
x marks the spot
received in spring
the defense of marriagl³.