SALE ON NOW! PROMOTIONS
Naima Yael Tokunow is a writer, educator, artist, and editor, living in New Mexico. Her work focuses on exploring Black queer femme identity, kinship, and futurity. She is the author of three chapbooks, MAKE WITNESS (2016), Planetary Bodies (2019), out from Black Warrior Review, and Shadow Black, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown for the Frontier Digital Chapbook Prize in 2020. She proudly edits the Black Voice Series for Puerto del Sol and reads for POETRY Magazine. For selections of her work, visit naimaytokunow.com. She is blessed to be Black and alive.
“The poems in Shadow Black move from startling moments of subtlety to satisfying passages of rant. Naima Tokunow is also a poet of the body, and in that tradition she calls for the liberation of the black body in particular: ‘It refuses. It declines. It makes its own.’ I’m so glad to have these poems in my life.” —Jericho Brown, Guggenheim Fellow & author of The Tradition “Shadow Black eludes and surprises, a palimpsest against which Naima Yael Tokunow projects the difficult ontology of a lyric identity destabilized by paradigmatic forces meant to corral queerness and femaleness and the facets of a bi-racial identity. Tokunow is a limber lyric poem with a diamond-hard edge that will ‘…find the way to make teeth/and to open [her] mouth for them…’” —Carmen Giménez Smith, Co-Director of Cantomundo & author of Be Recorder “Shadow Black's poems are tightly wound, angled with energy against their specific and deliberate forms, often prosaic, often menacing and eager for the soft mouth of a reader. Riding on the tension between academic, prophetic, elegiac and manifesto voices, Tokunow employs language that seeks moments of penetration and surprise. To experience this collection is to experience the myriad responses, violent and hopeful, to the projection hugging so much skin in America: Shadow Black.” —Josh Roark, Editor of Frontier Poetry
