Description
About the Author
Shaina Phenix is a writer and educator from Harlem. The 2021-22 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is assistant professor of English at Elon University.
Reviews
"To Be Named Something Else is a collection that at once seems to have arrived from another world and is yet, clearly and deliberately, built from the incandescent materials of Black social life. These poems speak to the ancestors we know and love, the undaunted bards still walking among us, the sites and sounds of the Black quotidian rendered more surreal by Shaina Phenix's honed attention. This book lives in a space all its own. It is a song of grief, flight, and ongoing overcoming."-Joshua Bennett, author of The Sobbing School
"This is the kind of poetry collection I ache for. Shaina Phenix's invigorating debut alchemizes the properties of human spirit and generational circumstance to challenge perceptions about the contemporary American Black femme experience. Through a process of transmutation, the poems blend the personal with cultural criticism in a way that feels sacred, holy-like something a priestess-type could manage. Phenix refuses to forget from where and whom she comes. From biblical verse to new verse, poetic form to poetic deconstruction, in lyric and shape, this collection feels like a masterfully creative study of artistry, politic, inheritance, and sexuality in Black American Lit."-Faylita Hicks, author of HoodWitch
"Shaina Phenix's expansive practice flourishes at the intersections of many things. Here is a book of poems, a book of prayers-part choreopoem, part lineage song-a trace of Black femme becomings. Phenix ferries such sonic multiplicities into the blackest ink of this gathering ground steeped in Black feminist practices and reminds us of the discipline of imagining that some prayers can be. Virtuosic, lush, mystical, vexed, ablaze. To Be Named Something Else is fierce with the urgency of survival and also so in touch with its inner starlight, as in: 'I find myself thinking, that girl is something else. Find myself / thinking that girl is a little mouth of God."-Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
Book Information
ISBN 9781682262283
Author Shaina Phenix
Format Paperback
Page Count 110
Imprint University of Arkansas Press
Publisher University of Arkansas Press
Weight(grams) 272g