Cave Canem Poetry Prize

The poems in Chekwube Danladi's debut collection are attentive to the moments of agency that refute and confront the limits imposed on black femme bodies. As a whole it is preoccupied with utilizing the lessons of lived experience to comment on and engage with larger movements toward expression and liberation for black people across temporal and physical spaces. The collection moves in and out of the material and the spiritual world, in and out of nations and borders. The poems riff off and borrow from varied intellectual and quotidian discourses regarding queerness, Afro-diasporic lives, refugee studies, gender and sexuality, and Global South subjectivity, creating their own transgressive universe of discourse.

This collection of poems begins rooted in the landscape of the U.S. South as it voices singular lives carved out of immediate and historical trauma. While these poems dwell in the body, often meditating on its frailty and desire, they also question the weight that literary, historical, and religious icons are expected to bear. Within the vast scope of this volume, the poems arc from a pig farmer's funeral to Georges de la Tour's paintings and Toni Morrison's Beloved. With an ear tuned to the lift and lilt of speech, they wring song from sorrow and plant in every dirge a seed of jubilation. Rich in clarity and decisive in her attention to image, Natalie J. Graham writes resonant, lush poetry.