T he upcoming, empowering poetry anthology The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic, edited by Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, and Chicago poetry staple Jamila Woods, quickly manifested itself from a short conversation between Browne and Kevin Coval, one of the editors of the first BreakBeat Poets anthology, a collection of hip-hop poetry that came out in 2015. Although it’s billed as a sequel, the book-which will be released in paperback on April 3 and is available as an e-book now-can stand by itself: its dense, entrancing, necessary works by more than 60 black women poets create a black-girl-centric world of their own. Along with Woods’s contribution, “My Afropuffs,” and Browne’s powerful “If 2017 Was a Poem Title,” the book includes a plethora of sensual, sexy, painful, superreal subject matter. That includes Venessa Marco’s “Offwhite,” which faces the very personal black topic of colorism, and “Big Black Bitch” by Bianca Lynne Spriggs, which tells the story of the first black woman mail carrier, Mary Fields. The book provides a well-rounded look at what it means to be a black woman and in the process serves as a platform for our voices and bodies, revealing our maneuvers through the world as deeply relevant to and deserving of literary space.

We [the editors] were already in this real conversation about a need for
black women to have spaces specifically where they can reclaim their voice
and celebrate without being asked to be small, to be put into corners and

in boxes where they can not only be contained but categorized. Black Girl Magic was a response and war cry for not just being one way, but being messy and brilliant and understanding the ever-changing forms of the black women’s body.

    You wrote a poem called “Black Girl Magic” before you started working
    on the book. Did you or your poem have anything to do with the title?






I think the “positive” press is really just an overdue reflective pool of
the way black women have been categorized, stereotyped, flattened, and
ignored. So the positive really is just what it’s always been: Black women
are amazing. They create movements, fashion, trends, and children. Black
women are the backbones of communities, we are true partners, we are
staunch supporters in sisterhood and become beacons for those wracked into
silence following tragedies. Our humanity has always been commodified,
because to love ourselves truly would cause this whole capitalist
infrastructure to dissolve into ash. Black women are the freshest of the
fresh. Anything that doesn’t celebrate a black woman is only a

distraction.

Edited by Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, and Jamila Woods (Haymarket).