The Black Maria

"[Girmay's] every loss-she calls them estrangements-is a yearning for connection across time and place; her every fragment is a bulwark against ruin." -O, The Oprah Magazine

"This year, I've sought out and found solace in language, both poetry and prose. Aracelis Girmay's the black maria has left images still planted deep within me." -Ada Limón, The New Yorker

"Crowned by an extraordinary long poem interweaving the childhood of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson . . . Aracelis Girmay's third book of poetry looks at the crimes committed against African Americans throughout history and now . . . These poems repeat themselves, reuse lines, feel anxious and scattershot, but there is beauty and imperative witness everywhere here." -NPR Books

"the black maria isn't just some of the best poetry I read this year, it's also one of the most powerful and memorable collections I've read as an adult." -Adam Morgan, Chicago Review of Books

"The long history of abuse against African Americans threads through this latest excavation by Girmay, whose work always lays bare the importance of history and the vertigo caused by its unknowing." -Boston Globe

"Girmay [weaves] together intimate and communal stories to express the emotional agony of an exploited and paling culture. the black maria has an agenda, but not the one we might expect; rather than issuing a call to action for the Eritrean diaspora, the poet employs personal and ancestral experience to catalyze a unified, remembered loss. Her poetry is therefore a call for the recognition of vulnerability and subjectivity: in the poet's own words, '& so to tenderness I add my action.' At times, the collection reads like a historical text; occasionally, it feels like angst immortalized in a diary; most often, the black maria reads like a poeticized eulogy-at once a celebration of life, an effort at reconciliation with death, and a testament to the unifying power of loss." -Boston Review

"Girmay, winner of a 2015 Whiting Award, crafts a moving collection of lyrical, image-thick poems that balance on the knife edge separating vulnerability and unapologetic strength. The lives of Eritrean refugees and immigrants serve as the collection's thematic foundation, though Girmay also thoughtfully dissects and examines blights of America's current sociopolitical climate, particularly police brutality and the murders of such young black women and men as Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell . . . Girmay effortlessly slips between collective history and personal memory, tackling the subject of black pain without victimizing herself or exploiting the voices of the marginalized." -Publishers Weekly, *Starred*

"Whiting Award winner Girmay recalls the larger African diaspora as she commemorates more than 20,000 people who have died sailing from North Africa to Europe in a bid for a better life . . . Using bold, sharply lyric language, she addresses the drowned as 'you, ' encircling them in community and giving them a humanity and individuality death statistics belie. VERDICT: Beautiful, brilliant, and palpably angry; an important book all readers can appreciate." -Library Journal, *Starred*