The Seattle Public Library loves to promote books and reading. This monthly column is a space to share reading and book trends from a librarian\u2019s perspective.<\/em><\/p>\n Black people throughout the diaspora have long preserved their dynamic cultures through African and African American oral traditions and poetry. Poets of the Black\/African diaspora write passionately and often pull from many Black poetry forms and traditions<\/a> to express collective and individual joy, survival, pain, and various facets of their lives.<\/p>\n The collections suggested here explore, celebrate and illuminate the vast, intricate lives and experiences of Black people of the Americas, the Caribbean, on the continent of Africa, and throughout the world.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n In \u201cReprise,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> Golden, a Black American poet, photographer, installation artist and educator, creates a colorful, lyrical and piercing collection that is an unflinching look into the reality of navigating life as a Black trans person in the United States. They also examine what it means to survive and thrive despite the impacts of various systems of oppression. “Reprise\u201d explores Blackness, trans identity, queerness, gender, the meaning of being an American, family, love and the pandemic.<\/p>\n In poems such as \u201c& When They Come For Me (Reprise)\u201d and \u201c[XY]\/[XX],\u201d Golden uses repetition and creative use of form to further interrogate these themes. The pages are vibrant red, black, green and white, with stars and stripes that resemble the Pan-African\/African American flag. Golden\u2019s curated photography appears alongside many of their poems, further portraying the innate beauty and complexity of Black people, specifically Black trans people.<\/p>\n In her debut poetry collection \u201cWhat Had Happened Was,<\/a>“<\/strong> Ther\u00ed A. Pickens, Black American poet-scholar and professor at Bates College, seamlessly explores personal narrative, Black American life, systemic injustices, pop culture, history and chronic disability. Pickens\u2019 collection is categorized in four sections: \u201cThis,\u201d \u201cThat,\u201d \u201cMind You,\u201d \u201c& The Third.\u201d Many of her poems have a cadence reminiscent of writer and historian Paula Giddings\u2019 \u201cWhen and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Pickens boldly grounds readers in time and place with poems like \u201cOn This Day\u201d and \u201cCorona Poem,\u201d while poems such as \u201cThe Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death\u201d illustrate the realities of living with chronic disabilities. Pickens also explores love, grief and the self with poems \u201cmy lover says (my mind)\u201d and \u201cOn March 12, 2020, Breonna Taylor.\u201d<\/p>\n In her titular poem, Pickens writes, \u201cWhat had happened was I learned to love me later on: when no one was looking, I massaged a callus\/mistaking it for muscle, cascading pressure, alternating misrecognition.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThree Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story<\/a>“<\/strong> is a collection by Danielle Legros Georges, the late Haitian-born, Boston-based poet, writer, editor, translator and academic.<\/a> She was also Boston\u2019s second poet laureate. In \u201cThree Leaves,\u201d Legros Georges takes the reader on a journey of migration, postcolonialism, resistance and Black transnational collaborations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba and Haiti from the 1950s to the 1970s, while also exploring her own family history. Her parents were among the many Haitian educators who migrated to Congo in the wake of the country’s independence from Belgium.<\/p>\n In poems like \u201cIn Kinshasa\u201d and \u201cTrouble in Your Country,\u201d readers get a sense of how Haitians and Congolese people navigated their lives as well as what was happening in Haiti at that time. In other poems, Legros Georges delves into Belgium’s brutal colonial violence and exploitation of Congolese people and how that impact is still felt there today.<\/p>\n