Description

Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side”—as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With Sharp’s skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within its lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

DIAMOND SHARP is a writer from Chicago and an alumna of Wellesley College. She is an editor at Bandcamp and a former editor at Rookie. Her work has been featured on Chicago Public Radio and Poetry Foundation, as well as in
New York Times Magazine, PANK, and elsewhere.

978-1-64259-838-4 • 72 pages