Encompassing the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s astounding career, The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring. With deep empathy, thoughtfulness, charisma, and lyricism, Boyce-Taylor’s work explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes. Grief is both an anchor and a door throughout Boyce-Taylor’s poetry, as seen in Mama Phife Represents, a hybrid of memoir and verse on the death of her son, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Questions regarding Blackness and Black womanhood in the United States are stitched throughout her books, and Boyce-Taylor leans into a more overtly defiant political register in her latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, while maintaining the connective spine of the Trinidadian dialect that appears throughout all her work. Selections from these books, as well as her other poetry collections, appear in this new volume. Curated from Boyce-Taylor’s body of work, The Limitless Heart encapsulates her progression as a writer throughout the decades of her highly successful career.

Mama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body's lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.

Award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik 'Phife Dawg' Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection. Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother's grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments of their lives show a great love between mother and son. Artist and artist, teacher and friend. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's gift includes drawings, emails, hip-hop lyrics, and notes Malik wrote to his parents beginning at age eight. Both elegy and praise song, there is joy and sorrow, healing, and a mother's triumphant heart that rises and blooms again. Mama Phife Represents has been awarded the 2022 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry by The Publishing Triangle