It looked like someone had squeezed a store into a single cube of an ice tray (p.28). So much is squeezed into this book that the joy in you will be activated and released. Childhood memories, lovers, ancestors… Poems and prose are grounded in the day to day but allow us to sink deeply in a spiritual bath, warming us from the outside in. Thirty fabulous writers bring their gifts to bare in this gorgeous anthology.
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Black Joy Unbound is an anthology (edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle) of poetry, vignettes, celebrations of women: their families, of love, and of surviving the unending injustice of racism, and all the cruelties the world inflicts on black women. There is a shimmering beauty in these works, which are of a consistently high quality, even when describing pain. But always joy seems to triumph in these words.

In one of my favorite pieces,“Three Years Later,” A. Brown writes, “we got the scraps. The misshapen and defunct magic.” But out of those scraps, family bonds weave a picture of love, seen through the lens of a high-stakes foot race and a box of origami butterflies.

The pieces are often exuberant outpourings of language, of desire, of willpower, of love. There is a lovely story in which the narrator tries to remember a pair of here mother’s shoes and remembers all the shoes her mother had, remembers shopping at Buster Brown (names from my childhood!), until the shoes bring back all the love contained in that mother/daughter relationship.

Maria Hamilton Abegunde meditates on the necessity for her of writing to connect with the presence of joy, the function of joy, in her lovely piece, “The Spirit of the Rhythm Catches You and You Dance.” Of writing she says, “I am alive because I write. . . . My writing is a practice dedicated to joy’s ‘constant unfolding. . .’”And of dancing she writes, “I am freest, most Black and, therefore, joyful, when I am dancing.” This essay contains so many lines I long to quote, to remember I will have to stop before I end up quoting the entire piece!

I will end with this quote from “To: Whom It May Concern/Re: Black Joy,” poet Regina YC Garcia almost sings:

The children know that there is love
Just there
In Black joy
and for ALL who may be concerned
Know this—
While this joy is juxtaposed to pain
the glory is that it can
Emerge
again, and again
Black Joy
Shine
Radiate
Refine
Create
More and more
Great God! Black joy!

I urge everyone to give themselves the gift of this collection, of the diversity of pieces united by the common theme of “Black Joy Unbound.” ( )