Description
Edythe Rodriguez’ debut We, the Spirits is an excavation of cultural memory and reawakening of what was buried. It is the thick air filling you with sweet spice and scotch bonnet. It is a salve to the soul.
Rodriguez conjures the Black ancestry and spirit that animates our world, brings necessary healing, and beckons us to return to our ancient selves.
Winner of the 2022 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest
Praise for Edythe Rodriguez
Edythe Rodriguez’s We, the Spirits has a bone to pick in the best possible way. With an array of innovative language and magnetic imagery, this collection is equal parts excavation and cultivation. These poems demand your attention. They’re confrontational and forceful, but there is so much love here too, love that can only come from deep understanding and observation. Rodriguez has given us a collection that is rooted firmly in history, is bursting with all the thorns and possibilities of the present, and is growing — strangely and strongly — towards a new and exciting future.
— Zach Goldberg, author of I’d rather be destroyed
What a gift this collection is to my Black soul. The air in these poems is thick with conjure and summer heat and the smell of love coming from the kitchen, thick with music and praise and tongues that make me feel at home within these brilliantly written lines. Launching from a critical praxis into a praxis of being, rejecting an assumed context of whiteness to instead flourish in a Black and timeless place, what Edythe Rodriguez has crafted is part balm, part fuel, and wholly excellent. These poems will strut their brilliance around your mind and heart long after reading.
— Danez Smith, author of Black Movie
“In the Black girl heaven of Edythe Rodriguez’ poems, Black life is giving. It is the ether, everywhere, and like these poems, done been worthy of our tender regard and reverence. Edythe’s knife-edge elegizing is a reckoning and a balm.”
— Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, Philadelphia Poet Laureate 2016-2017
We, the Spirits transmutes lyric to liberation. Bending time, location and space, Rodriguez’s pen performs the alchemy of language, creating worlds of depth out of lived experience, insightful observations and a love of history. These poems are full of rhythm, shimmer, shade and seasoning. A mouthwatering meal awaits at the first page.
— Ashia Ajani, author of Heirloom