BLK: SO BLACK WE SHINE

Liseli A. Fitzpatrick’s book BLK is an answer. Here are poems written by a scholar-poet, a writer and weaver of language who skillfully balances tradition, identity, liberation, history, and Black woman space in her poetry. Fitzpatrick understands that liberation, like Blackness, is an action verb. Therefore, craft and consciousness are synonymous in this marvelous debut collection of poems. As a natural storyteller, she seamlessly connects readers with elements of earth, rain, and other beautiful things such as the very oxygen we collectively breathe. Fitzpatrick presents language as visually and rhythmically as the community she reflects. She is “quilting fabrics from scraps” making something out of material that makes one stronger. Music drums vibrantly through these lines and dances freely between the notes of Black Arts in continual movement.