Breathe

by Angel C. Dye

$11.00
5 x 7 | 38 pages | Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-941604-11-3

Publication Date: August 2021

Breathe is a timely offering and a catalogue of sharp inhales and deep exhales punctuated by the shifting air around us. Ancestral wounds and present-day pain unwind on these pages, but even in the darkest depths of their undercurrents, there is hope and joy to be found. These poems roar with the truths of the body and its breaks, and sigh with its jagged sutures. In this powerful debut collection, Angel C. Dye bears witness to the sacredness of scars and to the power of community, self-love, and faith in a grand design. .


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about the author



ANGEL C. DYE | photo credit: Reneé Walter

ANGEL C. DYE is a poet, scholar of African American Literature and the author of BREATHE (Central Square Press). She is from Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas/Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a graduate of Howard University, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky, where she was a Nikky Finney fellow. Dye has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and Furious Flower Poetry Center and her work has appeared in About Place Journal, The Pierian Journal, African Voices Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and A Gathering Together Journal, among other places. Dye writes in the tradition of Lucille Clifton, Amiri Baraka, and Sterling A. Brown, striving to carry on their legacies of unapologetic blackness in the face of oppression, radical self-love, and artistic activism. She aims to discover, as Audre Lorde explains, “the words [she does] not yet have," and is currently a PhD in English student at Rutgers University.

PRAISE FOR BREATHE

"To read Breathe is a journey into the collective and familial consciousness of Black girlhood. The chapbook skirts across the speaker’s memory and reader’s mind. The chapbook is liberation, joy, forgiveness, and complex Blackness. In this chapbook, Dye is speaking to the “girlsgirlsgirls” and beautifully articulating the millennial angst and awareness. It is here in the angst and awareness that the family trauma and the impact of mass incarceration is laid at the altar of the reader." — DaMaris B. Hill, author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing
 
"A stunning debut, Breathe pulls us into a corporeal awareness and demands that we measure each moment of our exhaling even as it beckons us to imagine another existence. These poems sing our songs. These poems are prayer and lament. These poems are a praising—calling every reader to “worship at altars of their own fears and failures” and inviting Black women to slide into the truth and pleasure of being despite the horrors we endure. These poems whisper and shout. This is the chant we need right now." — Shauna M. Morgan, author of Fear of Dogs & Other Animals

 

 

 

 

 

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