Suddenly we / Evie Shockley.

Includes bibliographical references.

We:: Becoming & Going -- Perched -- No car for colored [+] ladies (or, miss wells goes off [on] the rails) -- The Blessings -- The Beauties: Third Dimension -- Blues-Elegy for cheryl -- (In)site unseen -- Sol(ace) song -- The lost track of time -- We:: Uppity & Down -- Women's voting rights at one hundred (but who's counting?) -- Nature Studies -- Fruitful -- Dive In -- What does it mean to be human? -- In this light -- "The musician stands out" (or, le musee de l'orangerie curates a history lesson) -- Breonna taylor's final rest (or, the furies are still activists) -- Color bleeding -- Destin(ed)ation -- Migratory patterns: birds of paradise -- We:: Indurate & Out -- Virtually free -- Fire Works -- Can't Unsee -- An inoculation against innocence -- One foot out of the panorama -- Umbra's ell -- In Relation: A semi-cento with, for, and about john keene (et al.) -- Jury Duty -- Prefixed -- Holla -- Anti-immigration -- Ex patria -- We:: Adhere & There -- The center of a tension -- Direct to your table -- We'd like to propose -- Brava gente -- Pantoum: 2020 -- Sonnet for the long second act -- Facing south -- Les milles.

"Shockley repurposes literary and musical modes from across centuries of African American and diasporic traditions. Given the choice between formal flawlessness and page-spanning sprawls, between autobiographical revelation and collective outcry, she welcomes the self-contradictions of being all the above."-- Provided by publisher.

"Evie Shockley's new poems invite us to dream-and work-toward a more capacious 'we'. In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious 'we.' How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other? Beginning with the visionary art of Black women like Alison Saar and Alma Thomas, Shockley's poems draw and forge a widening constellation of connections that help make visible the interdependence of everyone and everything on Earth. perched i am black, comely,a girl on the cusp of desire.my dangling toes take the rest the rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent on manifesting my soul in the discouraging world. under the rough eyes of others, i stiffen. if i must be hard, it will be as a tree, alivewith change. inside me, a love of beauty riseslike sap, sprouts from my scalpand stretches forth. i send out my song, an ariablue and feathered, and grow toward it, choirs bare, but soon to bud. i amblack and becoming. -after Alison Saar's Blue Bird"-- Provided by publisher.