This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets

“It is a long story set to music, a rich and jeweled history sung to the rhythm of the decades, each poet making a case for joy . . .”

With the founding of the “The Black Joy Project” in 2015, writer Kleaver Cruz titled a movement already widely present in the arts. One that was not about dismissing or creating an “alternate” narrative around the realities of collective pain for Black people, but rather about holding the pain and injustice “in tension with the joy we experience.” In other words, joy as resistance movement that contextualized history in order to transcend it.

Five years later, columnist Chante Joseph penned a visual essay for Vogue UK about the Black demonstrations against that government’s attempts to criminalize Black Lives Matter protests. She wrote, “under a grey-ish June 2020 London sky, dressed in black, masked up and with pickets in hand, a majority Black group of protesters uniformly performed the Electric Slide to Cameo’s “Candy.” With hair flying and Nike pouches swinging, in the middle of a collective outpouring of grief and anger, here were people taking a moment of joy to bask in the beauty of what it means to be Black—both the pain and the celebration.”

That ethos is echoed, expressly, in the work of contemporary visual artists such as Derrick Adams, famous for his “floaters”: sunny depictions of Black men, women, and children lounging in pools enjoying leisurely moments of joy surrounded by friends and loved ones. Or in the work of Tschabalala Self, who shows Black people, usually women, “subversively doing nothing” beyond basking in their own sense of beauty and sensuousness.

Kwame Alexander’s new Black poetry anthology, This Is the Honey, feels of a piece with the impetus of those works, of those words. As he says in his introduction to this collection, “So much of the time, Black writers are expected to write about the woe.” The antidote is what he calls “the in-between” of this book: “a gathering space for Black poets to honor and celebrate. To be romantic and provocative. To be unburdened and bodacious. The poetry in this collection is not us looking outward; it’s an unbridled selfie. To marvel at. And reflect. It’s for us. But also it is for you. The poems here are meant to inspirit, uplift, and rejoice. They are unapologetically matter-of-fact Black. Poems full of hope and humor and humanity of a proud people who hold the promise of tomorrow in their hearts.”

Which is not to say every poem is breezy, happy, or even light, and thank editor Alexander for that. For as wonderful a premise, a human goal, as joy is, poetry needs a little tension, a little black with its blue, a point of contrast from which to rejoice, that we may feel the unexpected grace of a dark verse peeking from the petticoats of poems wrapped in sundrenched yellow cloaks, as in these lines from Cortney Lamar Charleston’s "I'm Rooting for Everybody Black:"

“Everybody Black is good peoples. Everybody Black been through

some things. Everybody Black don't get the credit they're due. I met

Everybody Black once and they were super chill and down-to-earth.

I believe in Everybody Black. There's something about Everybody Black.”

And Inua Ellams’ “Fuck / Time”:

“Once upon a time / Yo-Yo Ma / traveling through Botswana searching

for music / crosses a local shaman singing / into the savannah / He

rushes to notate the melody / Please Sing Again he requests / to which

che shaman sings something else and explains / to the baffled Yo-Yo Ma

that earlier / clouds had covered the sun and wild antelope grazed in the

distance / But the dial of the world had twirled since / The antelopes

had cantered into some other future / The clouds had gone / so the song

had to change / had to slough off the chains us mortals clasp everything

with / even our fluid wrists / The universe in fact is monstrously

indifferent to the presence of man / We are small as moth wing fall / in

an orchestra broad as galaxies / playing a symphony Time isn't bothered

to fathom / It respects no constant and is always moving on”

And poems of great emotional range by Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Alice Walker, Willie Perdomo, Sheree Renee Thomas, Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, Ross Gay, Nicole Terez Dutton, Elizabeth Acevedo, truth thomas, Jacqueline Woodson, Amanda Gorman, Gregory Pardlo, Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, Morgan Parker, Abdul Ali, Sonia Sánchez, Safiya Sinclair, poet/editor Kwame Alexander, and Chris Slaughter, who brought his “Dear Barbershop” to this party:

“I come from you; every argument, debate and dare—

every hand-me-down bet that taught me to run

from nothing while fading the world down small enough

to doubt. No one else understands the gravity

in the way a chair turns after a fight, and blood stains

hair and hardwood floors. Music somehow tells the story”

And that is another characteristic of This Is the Honey: And Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. It is a long story set to music, a rich and jeweled history sung to the rhythm of the decades, each poet making a case for joy instead of, in spite of, after the fact, in forgiveness of what happened, in love that makes no sense, in wanton bodily freedom, the entire book, too, an effective argument for broadening our idea of Blackness, regardless of race or life experience, if only for the chance to enjoy the tenuous, sometimes excessively slow and dubious progress of humanity. Because even though it’s some kind of progress, this progress, though it’s some cheaply subtle and fickle progress, we should enjoy it, we deserve to enjoy it while we still can. Soon the pendulum will swing the other way again.