7 Poetry Collections About the Complexities of Black Womanhood 

I went to a high school with about 1700 students and only 30 of them were Black. My Mama lived in the country—she always had red clay under her nails. She talked with her siblings more than her schoolmates. My Grandma was tugged off the school bus at 14 to help with chores and got her GED when she was 60 years old. As for my grandma on my dad’s side, she grew up in the city surrounded by Black folks; her mother’s experience was the same. Nevertheless, the stereotype, the monolithic western way of looking at the Black women would have you thinking we all grew up the same, that there is no individuality. It’s frustrating to say the least.

These caricatures dehumanize; these falsehoods lack nuance and intersections. When the poems for Thick with Trouble started to stitch themselves together into a collection the personas of the Black woman I had met throughout my life started to animate on the page. Their voices were full of life, pain, joy, anger, sexiness, at times dominating and often flirting with softness—complexity. 

All of these poetry collections endeavor to answer the question: What does it mean to be both Black and a Woman? All of the answers are different—Black womanhood is multifaceted and finding a safe passage through it is the challenge of a lifetime. 

These collections light a lantern and illuminate a way…

Woman Eat Me Whole by Ama Asantewa Diaka 

Divided into four sections and brimming with life this debut poetry collection from Ghanaian poet Ama Diaka is both fierce and cerebral. The opening poem, “Ama Nkrumah,” boldly states: “you haven’t been loved well enough until you’ve been loved like a man.” The speaker in this poem is painfully aware of the double standard and pushes against the idea of what Black women are supposed to be. Ama’s meditation on Black womanhood speaks to the restless of the constraints society puts on women.

Woman Eat Me Whole experiments with form using free verse, twitter conversations, reinvented dictionary definitions and more. All which craft a stunning debut collection.

The Collection Plate by Kendra Allen

A psalm of girlhood and all its complexities, award-winning essayist and poet Kendra Allen inspects the mundane, the Black church, the brutal and the beautiful in this collection. Documented through overlapping experiences of girlhood the poems utilize space, diction, the colloquial and the deconstruction of form to speak for the underrepresented Black girl. At its heart, the poems sing a song of survival despite conditions. 

Imagery of water/wetness is splattered throughout the book—in baptism, sex or through tears, reminding the reader of the necessity and dangerous qualities of water. 

The poem, “Sermon Notes,” offers this warning: “Note: Passion is a kind of florescence    a water well in its rapture/ and then you find/ your burning man.” 

3. I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas

A collection about self-discovery and moving out of South side Chicago, this collection is inspired by the musical The Wiz. Taylor Byas is a master of form in this creative and unique debut collection. The reader is taken on an evolutionally journey into womanhood with searing sonnets and sestinas that haunt.

With poems with titles like, “Men Really Be Menning,” “This Kill Bill Scene Has Me Thinking About Weave and Girl-Fights,” and “On Getting Ate Up By Mosquitoes” an authentic moving picture is painted. One that both loves and critiques the south side of Chicago. Byas is able to evoke whimsy and truth simultaneously leaving the reader in awe. The poem, “Yes, the Trees Sing” does this when it states: “Our backyard’s weeping willow is really a woman with micro braids all the way down her waist.” Now all willows are Black women with mico braids.

4. I Remember Death By Its Proximity To What I Love by Mahogany L. Browne

Browne inspects the devastating effects of the prison system in America and condemns how that system causes generational harm. The poems speak to vulnerability (a girl misses her father) and generational traumas (incarceration does not simply harm the imprisoned—the pain also ripples through families and can be felt for generations).

The collection is both honest and heart wrenching with moments of levity and despair. Browne also utilizes footnotes to offer deeper insight into the deeper meaning of a poem and her thoughts on poetry in general: “As I am writing this in a time in which poets accuse each other of noncommittal words (like “wonder”), if I may interject.”

Browne speaks on the strength of loved ones left behind and the endurance of Black women: “I am/I am/ I am/ the worst kind of thief/ I steal your swag right in front of your own eyes/ right in front of your own children.” 

How To Carry Water: Selected Poems by Lucille Clifton 

I practice Hoodoo which means no recommendation list is complete without an ancestor included. How to Carry Water includes some of Cliftons most profound poems about the Black experience includes ten formally unpublished poems.

This collection has all of Clifton’s devastating clarity and stunning directness—everything that makes her timeless.

“whose side are you on?

The side of the busstop woman

trying to drag her bag 

up the front steps before the doors

clang shut.   i am on her side”

Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino

Often reading like a spell, Witch Wife is striking, mystical and wildly imaginative. This collection also includes sestinas and villanelles that call ancestors to life and speaks to the history hidden in one’s blood. The collection is empowering, honest, haunting and haunted. 

In “Little Gals,” Petrosino creates a setting that is both atmospheric and unsettling, like many poems in this collection, often conjuring the unnerving: “They come at night/ on membranous/ wings. I’m a soft deer/ browsing the woods/with strands of willow/ in my pelt.” 

I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clarke

This poetry collection, the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, inspects the difficulties of being a Black woman in the South while also commenting on faith, interracial families and tradition. Clarke considers the subconscious and conscious harm Black folks in the south endure living so close to places where their ancestors were often brutally murdered. In the poem “Soil Horizon” the poet says: “How do we stand on the dead and smile? I carry so many black souls/ in my skin, sometimes I swear it vibrates, like a tuning fork when struck.”

Clarke’s collection is haunted, telling the dark history of Tennessee and often evoking the images of Black bodies swinging from trees. As the title dictates, I can’t talk about the trees without the blood. This collection succeeds in highlighting parts of history that are often skimmed over in sharp, innovated, raw and captivating ways.