Page Street Publishing, 2024, 148 pp.
Angela Shanté’s new poetry collection, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, is subtitled “A Love Letter to Black Girls.” A former public school teacher and author of illustrated children’s books, Shanté confronts “Black Girls vs. The World” in these powerful poems, writing, “I want to live in a world where Black girls get to be free.”
In her introduction, she confesses, “Poetry and experimental storytelling have always anchored me when the rainbow truly wasn’t enough,” paraphrasing Ntozake Shange. She claims she wrote the book that she herself aways wanted to read—a book to be read out loud, full of choreopoems vivid in their articulation and poetic outcry.
The poet evokes an American history that has always exploited and abused Black people, and the salve for the wounds suffered by Black women can be found in their respect for inheritance, tradition, and legacy. She credits her own admiration for the elders who molded and shaped her during childhood as key to her survival. Her relationship with her mother, and with her older sister, who assumed a maternal role as their mother was often absent, proved vital to the “unboxing” of Angela Shanté.
The poet writes of boxes, or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her prose poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb meaning “to flaunt” in her own code of language. And through this word, she describes the economic barriers between herself and her sister and the other children in the neighborhood, whom she was told to call “the poor.”
Having luxuries placed you in a tier above. I knew that if I had something I could flaunt over another person, the world would treat me a little nicer. Hold me a little gentler. So, allowance was a big get. It meant my big sister and I were a pair of the very few girls in our hood who had money to spend. Having extra was a big floss.
The poet reveals that “some boxes are chosen for us”—the defined, restrictive, and established roles Black girls are forced to play by their own families, who instill in them certain codes of behavior. Other boxes become part of the wider, more insidious influence of false socialization, the process of becoming indoctrinated by these lies, caused by racial differences, economic stratification, and prejudice.
This collection strongly evokes the philosophy of James Baldwin as described in Begin Again, Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s series of timely essays on the life and work of the novelist and social critic. There are obvious similarities between the process of unboxing the self as described in Shanté’s poems and the personal transformation Baldwin experienced through his work. Glaude writes:
“Imagine as a child grappling with the hurtful words that say you’re ugly,” [Baldwin] intimates to Fern Marja Eckman, his first biographer. “You take your estimate of yourself from what the world says about you. I was always told that I was ugly. My father told me that. And everybody else. But mostly my father. So I believed it. Naturally. Until today I believed it.”
The mission of Shanté’s work is to lay claim to and reinforce the beauty found in the Black family, in the Black body and mind, and within the landscapes of the neighborhoods in which we dwell. As she writes in The South Bronx: “between the grime and litter / over burned buildings / and through smoke-filled highways / i can make out beauty”. This is the recurring theme of her poems: there is inherent beauty in the lives of Black people that cannot be stifled, maligned, or ignored. She convinces her readers that we all need to step out of our boxes.
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Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA writing program of Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She is at work on two new poetry collections, a collection of short fiction, and a memoir. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Callaloo, Calyx, Cave Wall, Euphony Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Seneca Review, World Literature Today, and many other literary and scholarly journals.
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