Black Poetic Inquiry

“This book is nourishment. It shows us with grace, courage and beauty how to live life through deep paying attention and spiritual connections. I could not get enough of the book. I want more books like this: accessible, transformational, and deeply joyful. It made me feel and think about the wonder and depth of what we consider ordinary things, about how language is our saving grace and how writing poetry makes language an archive for sensibility and compassion.

The reader sits in appreciation for the ‘call and response’ of these two poets as a felt-sensing experience and for social justice as an internal and material. There is so much life in these pages: I found myself aligned with the mother who loves animals more than people; childhood memories of Aunt Jemma and Uncle Ben; the consequences of potty training; learned that ‘tick-a-lock’ is culturally more graceful than ‘shut-up’ and so, so much more. From Amiri Baraka to Billy Porter, from James Baldwin to Michael Jackson, we witness “templates of sociality,” poetry as “critical praxis,” and ‘spirit writing. What is more, we lean anew the value of the month of January through new dimensions of experience and memory. The book is an affirmation to think like a poet each day in deep friendship and loving care.”

D. Soyini Madison, PhD, Professor Emeritus, School of Communication, Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University, author of Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance and editor of The Woman That I am: The Literatures of Contemporary Women of Color

“This evocative book employs what the co-authors call “collaborative spirit-writing.”’ It is an approach the authors have now refined over 5 collaborative book projects together. Their collaborative spirit-writing method “involves writing quickly and effortlessly from a spiritual space that includes the collaboration between spirits, our own and the spirits of our ancestors known and unknown.” How fortunate we are to be able to engage with these two collaborators in such a love-driven endeavour, bearing witness to the inheritance of their own wisdom as well as the deep knowledge their ancestors. This is collaborative autoethnography, relational qualitative enquiry, and intimate and performance co-poetic inquiry at it best. It is all these things and more.

Formally, we learn that the poems were written in a 24-hour period, as a ‘call and response’ exchange, engaging a form of collaboration that the authors do so well. Theirs is a sustained call and response practice that traverses a rich body of performance and scholarly work. They situate this work within the growing fields of poetic inquiry and critical autoethnography. Importantly, as this work is avowedly most directly about Black lived experience, they identify it as Black poetic inquiry, and recognise it as part of the legacy of not only Black scholars, but of Black poets and writers across multiple literary and scholarly forms. The authors’ engage ‘activist affect’ and the work that performance/poetic autoethnography can (and must) do in times of social crisis.

This book is a companion to their contemporaneous publication, Epistolary Autoethnographies on Loss, Memory and Resolution: Reflections on Black Motherhood (Routledge, 2025). While that book is ostensibly concerned with loss, and this one with love, they are – as readers will undoubtedly understand – inextricably linked experiences, and it is together that these two friends, colleagues and collaborators seek to understand them.

It is deeply moving and rare to read this work on Blackness by two friends who not only share so much but also are so different. Solidarity across different sexual orientations, class backgrounds, gender identifications, and life journeys is the counterpoint to a shared experience of being Black in America at a time when the authors can both celebrate the positive changes since their parents’ generation, while also mourning together about the miles left to go toward ensuring equity, access and respect. This book contributes profoundly to that project.”

Stacy Holman Jones, Professor of Theatre and Performance,Monash University and Daniel Harris, Professor and Associate Dean, RMIT

"This book is an absolute must read that you will return to over and over. Alexander and Weems made me fall in love with poetry all over again as they show how collaborative spirit writing can sustain work, relationships, and our souls. I intend to share this beautiful book with my students and poetry colleagues as a method we can all adopt to help write out the points of meaning in the seemingly mundane moments of life."

Sandra L. Faulkner PhD, Professor of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University