Description:
Contemporary poetry from Black, Brown, and Indigenous writers in the Northeast of the US. Poets connect with nature, land, and place; we have deep roots in this region and continue to thrive here.
Brief description: Samaa Abdurraqib lives in Wabanaki territory, close to the ocean and the mountains. Recently, her poetry can be found in Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, Cider Press Review, Writing the Land: Maine, and in her self-published chapbook Each Day Is Like an Anchor (2020).
Review Quotes:
I am so pleased to have had a chance to spend time with the poems gathered in From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous PoetsWrite the Northeast. What a rich variety of voices! The book makes "a place for our bodies in these surroundings," offering a rich assortment of forms, experiences, and perspectives. I appreciate any collection that creates a space for so many urgent voices and visions. This anthology offers the kind of rich (and enriching) bounty of contemporary poetry that makes the literary world a better, brighter, and more open space.
----Camille T. Dungy, author of SOIL: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
From Root to Seed could be the most important book you ever read. It is more than a book of poems; it is a collection of brilliant voices, a community of visionaries brought together to teach us that our purpose on this planet, which we have deeply harmed, may be the very thing that restores it. These songs of praise, written as poems or prose by those whose ancestors and souls have deep relationship with the place and beings in the northeast, are the attention, love, and celebration that a neglected planet needs. From Root to Seed reminds us that the most important thing we can plant may be words, for words become seeds of hope, which, with love and attention, become actions, and those actions, like the medicine in these words, have the power to heal. Let this book mentor you, let it inspire you, and hold it as proof that we, the human beings capable of destruction, are also capable of incredible beauty.
-- CMarie Fuhrman, co-editor Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing
In one of the poems in this book, Dr. Samaa Abdurraqib describes the place where the ocean meets the forest as a congregation and the trees' existence as spirit-work. This book is where the ocean meets the forest. It's spirit-work. It's a calling and it's an answer. It's a reminder that communities of color are as intertwined with nature as to be one with her. You will find a forest of beauty, joy, struggle, silence, and wonder in each and every poem."
- Kim M. Bailey, President & CEO, Justice Outside
From Root to Seed is an anthology of resistance--ecopoetry that centers the lyrics of Indigenous, Black, and Brown poets is expanding our canon for who is known to speak about, and on the behalf of, earth. The collection is a shift in culture and perspective. These poems show the interrelationships between natural, spiritual, and manmade ecosystems and the many parallels between the devastation of our environment to the suffering of racialized bodies in the United States. However, it is not a collection of poetry by IBPOC, if there is no poetry about resilience and gratitude and celebration for the water, land, and sky that has gotten us here and continues to get us through. ---Arisa White, author of Who's Your Daddy
There is almost no other aspect of human existence more important than space. Where we find ourselves is how we find ourselves. These poems interrogate the balance between the spaces we claim and the spaces that claim us, with a glorious range of grit and finesse; with care and reckless abandon. Every poem in here is either a life saver or a saved life.
----Scott Woods, Author of Urban Contemporary History Month