Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience - with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood. This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge - of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world. The central poem, 'Eighteen', chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault. In it the speaker is reborn from the shadow of the experience as a 'miracle scream' and a 'dark voice', and vows to 'learn the language that will allow [her] to summon [her] own angels'. By the poem 'Thirty', the speaker understands 'maybe older and wiser is just learning/ how to put yourself in your own good hands'. The poems of age scattered throughout the manuscript both chronicle and disrupt time - they look back into the speaker's past as a way to understand the present, as well as to find something that the speaker needs in order to move forward. The many elegies in the collection consider the ultimate price of life, which is death, and as the poem 'How It Touches Us' comes to realise, 'all laws of matter must hold true'. The poems are a movement through fracture - both necessary and unwarranted - toward wholeness and transformation.

Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than a hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, and Justin Philip Reed, combined with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Evie Shockley, and Meta DuEwa Jones. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice, to ask, "What's next for Black poetic expression?

"One of the penalties of an ecological education," wrote Aldo Leopold, "is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." As climate change and other environmental degradations become more evident, experts predict that an increasing number of people will suffer emotional and psychological distress as a result. Many are feeling these effects already. In the pages of Solastalgia, they will find a source of companionship, inspiration, and advice. The concept of solastalgia comes from the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who describes it as "the homesickness we feel while still at home." It's the pain and longing we feel as we realize the world immediately around us is changing, with our love for that world serving as a catalyst for action on its behalf. This powerful anthology brings together thirty-four writers-educators, journalists, poets, and scientists-to share their emotions in the face of environmental crisis. They share their solastalgia, their beloved places, their vulnerability, their stories, their vision of what we can create.

"These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don't. Thus in our sister's memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives." --Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of American Poets "In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred and militarized fear, 'Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say nothing?' Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and receive love." -- Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America "Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne's, Honeyfish is that she shows the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the day when these times are over and we can rejoice." -- Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic