Thick with Trouble

"Laced with magic and mystery . . . McBride provides readers with a fresh take on America's violence-laden past and present and a chorus of unapologetic women who summon their ancestors, their self-determination, and their histories to create empowerment and existence on their own terms." –The Southern Review of Books

"Amber McBride treats us to a playful litany of language that twists and leaps and never stumbles. Flavored with old-time Christianity, old-time hoodoo, and a modern alchemy all her own, it talks back to prejudice, reclaims the words meant to take people down, and forges new identities that shimmer with strength and strangeness." –Poetry Unbound

"[A] vibrant exploration of growing up as a Black woman in the American South . . . Visions, ghosts, hauntings, ruminations on the untimely deaths of young Black people are all examined through succinct yet no less devastating pieces. The coming of age poems are standouts, presenting the expectations for women from a young age . . . McBride is gifted at wordplay . . . a striking and powerful debut." –Booklist

"Reading Thick With Trouble by Amber McBride is the hoodoo holler handbook to counteract what ills us in this bleeding 'house that drips' called America. Here, freedom fights fluidly against spiritual and physical oppositions where 'a ghost can't write a ghost story, ' but a Black woman can 'gospel us into folklore.' I stand in awe before this offering of dark principles, divinations at the blade edge of an enjambment, and dire metamorphoses. 'Prayer rubs soft, gives way to clouds– /skulls crack and crack, ' she writes, and I believe in the prophet of this forecast. So should you." –Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny

"Thick with Trouble is a collection that sings like a chorus, an evocative and ancient kind of singing, incantatory and empowered. With poetic forms that challenge and surprise, Thick with Trouble is a knowing debut that subverts perceptions with lyricism, and calls upon the supernatural and ancestral to complicate and enlighten our collective gaze." –Rio Cortez, author of Golden Ax