To Be Named Something Else

✍ Scribed by Shaina Phenix

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 112
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

To Be Named Something Else, winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage—both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems aren’t—we’re dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin’ those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin’ the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . . To Be Named Something Else is a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. It’s tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply.” Phenix’s full-throated poetry, with its “superlative combination of formalism and funk,” is assuredly something else.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Hydrant Ode
GIRL – ROOT
Lucille
The Burning Haibun Remembers Who I Am
Nong
Cento
La Femme Noire: A Choreopoem
On Beat
Shug Avery Identifies as Pansexual, Poly, and Dares You to Say Anything about It
Be (V.)
MOTHER – GOD
Blood House
Aubade with Burning City
Harlem ’94–’04
Almost Ode
Trance
Ars Poetica on That Day
Hear Me Out, My Eyebrow Lady as
Kaleidoscope of Girl with Her Tits Out
Duplex with Garden
Family Pathology
Pantoum in Which I Am a Version of Keisha That Tommy Knows Better than to Play With
Ode to (My) Penis
I Do & We Live
American Pantoum with Bullet-Holes & Wall
BLOOD – ROT
Sermon
Clinic
Self-Portrait as Blood
T-H-U-G L-I-F-E
Breakfast Poem
Elegy with Beta Fish
Alternate Names for Blood:
Mothafuckin Sonnet
Self-Portrait Waking from Anesthesia
Reverse Ghazal in Harlem
Family Pathology with Alternate Universe
Why I Be Tryna Live How I Be Tryna Live
KIN – ALIVE
To Be Named Something Else
Sonnet While Black
Denim Ode
Opening
Portrait of My Mother before She Is Mine
The Apocalypse Comes for Us
Ghazal for Black Girls in Miami
Bad Bitch National Anthem
Nanna Says, Lord Have Mercy Jesus
How We Heal When We Die
Hymn
Genesis
Notes
Acknowledgments