#PopsugarReadingChallenge Book 32: This Is the Honey

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book that came out in a year ending in 24.
This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Black Contemporary Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander.

In the introduction, Alexander notes that Black poets are often "expected" to write about woe and struggle, and certainly some powerful writing has come out of those topics. But equally necessary is poetry about joy and wonder, and this volume is filled with poems of love, family, faith, heroes - and occasionally struggle, because joy can be found in standing up for justice. The contributors include many familiar names: Nikki Giovanni, Jericho Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Amanda Gorman - and many more who were new to me.

From the title poem, by Mahogany L. Browne:

There is no room on this planet for anything less than a miracle
We gather here today to revel in the rebellion of a silent tongue
Every day, we lean forward into the light of our brightest designs 
      & cherish the sun

There are poems about love: romantic, familial, and spiritual. There's the instant-classic Clint Smith poem This is an Incomprehensive List of All the Reasons I Know I Married the Right Person. And Alan King's Refractions, which describes a woman and her friends passing a group of men, bracing for the expected rude catcalls:

And when there were no thirsty stares,
did they see brothas aching for love's prism
to send each of them beaming in all directions?
Yo, D said, I want a family.
J shook his head, This single life is for the birds.

Is that why the sistas lingered, just close enough to hear y'all doo
wapping blues on a Friday with the late spring dawdling beyond
the threshold of dusk?

Is that why one of them found the courage to approach and said, I never
knew guys talked about things like this?

Even the poems about oppression are triumphant, refusing despair and fining meaning in the fight for something better. Whispers on the Wave, by Tanya Marie Matthews, begins:

whispers on the wave say daughter 
when I asked God why take me through such troubled water
He said your enemies can't swim.

---