better hands • E-book

Summary

Who breaks the cycle, and what does breaking it cost? Winner of the 2023 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, better hands eulogizes legacies of violence, underscored by a fervent desire of becoming. Mathews guides readers across and through “the infinity pink” in poems that drip a reverence tinged with resentment. Their debut chapbook engages myth, nature, and the body to honor the past and summon uncertain, ecstatic futures beyond.

Details

• Selected for the 2023 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize
• Saddle-stitched, risograph cover, 36 pages, 5″ x 7.25″, FSC-certified paper
• Purchase allows three PDF downloads
• Order print + e-book
• Order print book only

Praise

“The eye—the I—is rigorously generous across these poems. They don’t attempt to rebuild a world or define a world, rather they do something more powerful and difficult: they dare an intimate lexicon and imagery wild and energetic enough to bare the overwhelm of the unknown world and our relationship to and relationships within it. The lines flicker, from light to dark, a wet shine, an earthen darkness, a scar, a seed, the body and body of language, bordering the ecstatic. Images tremble and transform, become both familiar and surprising, under the pressure of the speakers’ unrelenting desires and I was lucky to find myself wandering the blur between memory, moment, and the impossibility of what might happen next. Within these poems is a bold embrace of sensuality and how language can be our portal to collapse the temporal and spatial hierarchies of ancestor and descendant—the poems seem to say: we are who we are from and we become what becomes us next.”
        —Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem

Author

Nailah Mathews (they/them) is a nonbinary Black poet to whom books and Black lives matter. A 2022 Periplus Fellow and 2023 Anaphora Arts alumn, their poetry has been featured in Hennepin Review, Lucky Jefferson, Passenger Journal, and the Black Lesbian Literary Collective among others. You can read their work at nailahwritesnovels.com.

Artwork

Cover by Nora Kelly.