suddenly we

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 restthe rest of my body refuses. spine upright,my pose proposes anticipation. i poisein copper-colored tension, intent onmanifesting 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

Commended for National Book Awards (Poetry) 2023

“" suddenly we sings the nuanced realities of Black life as homage, elegy, and polyphonic celebration striking at the core of remembrance. A deep and unfettered thinking, Shockley gives us shouts of joy amidst the drudge of a world unraveled."--Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite”

"This verbally and visually stirring outing from Shockley (Semiautomatic) offers a rewarding mix of short and long poems, elegies and odes, images, repetitions, and 'conversation' with writers and artists Shockley's poems are risk-taking and significant"--Publishers Weekly

"...an astonishing variety of poetic styles... and across all of it there's a sense of play and innovation..."--Brittney Edmonds, New Books Network

"Evie Shockley's work is imbued with a particular kind of tenderness, for the world and for the self in the world. It's a savvy tenderness wedded to a type of vigilance that continually tracks the lines of the political and the personal, documenting where they meet and where they later separate again..."--Poetry Society of America

"There is so much movement but also transformation. A blossoming, a birthing, a blooming that is really intriguing."--Dean Rader, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Shockley's homophones and verbal play shred the sentence into its most basic units. The result is as charming and fun as it is political. Her book probes inheritance: what we inherit from history and from language."--Diana Mehta, Electric Lit

"suddenly we sings the nuanced realities of Black life as homage, elegy, and polyphonic celebration striking at the core of remembrance. A deep and unfettered thinking, Shockley gives us shouts of joy amidst the drudge of a world unraveled."--Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite

EVIE SHOCKLEY, (Jersey City, NJ) poet and scholar, is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University. A Lannan Literary Award-winner, she is the author of multiple books of poetry including a half-red sea; the new black, which received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry; and semiautomatic, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

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