"'Grief for Breakfast' was inspired by a conversation a friend and I had during the recent Black Lives Matter protests. We imagined a 'Black womxn paradise,' a place where we could exist free from grief. A place where we could love and be loved out loud. A place where we could reclaim agency over our bodies and our existence. This poem is an obverse—a poetic form created by the poet Nicole Sealey."
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Judge Henri Cole noted, "He gives voice to the experiences and aspirations of middle-class Black America, and though the promised land is faraway, he finds grace in the natural world, long marriage, and fathering. These supple, socially responsible poems seem to me a triumphant, paradoxical, luminous response to a violent time in our history."
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"What is a weed in one cultural context is medicine or food in another; what is invasive in one ecosystem is native to another; and plants, like matter, as William James would wisely say, have no ideals. What I brought to the Star Thistle was what Adam Phillips in his marvelous book Darwin’s Worms would call the problem of grieving in a secular age."
