The Black Outside

The Black Outside is an ensemble of poems that archives personal and ancestral memory, contextualizing loss and longing in a world created by transatlantic slavery. In these poems, Black ecology is lived and thought across a range of sites, from the "interior gardens" to "grief's aquatic caves." At these sites, Priest's speaker steps through a hole in the fabric of Western reality, a portal to a world outside, a surreal elsewhere. Here, she encounters musicians, philosophers, revolutionaries, and lovers who offer methods of escape and relation with nonhuman life. In an anti-pastoral gesture, Priest tarries around the landscape, refusing to look away and reflecting on her place in larger histories that have inaugurated our changing climate. In doing so, she invites us to understand loneliness as a communal experience, to emancipate ourselves from isolation.

"The Black Outside is a deft, well-crafted, book-length poetic mediation on family, race, ecology, and more. There are beautiful love poems and longing poems and family poems and elegies and not-quite pastorals and odes. There's so much music in this book, and so much celebration, and so much sorrow and devastation. The Black Outside offers many wonderfully unmooring readings. I love it."--Ross Gay, author of, The Book of (More) Delights