Books like Don't let me be lonely by Claudia Rankine

Ibram X. Kendi’s *How to Be an Antiracist* explains racism as a powerful system that creates false hierarchies and offers a guide—drawing on ethics, history, law, and science—to help readers confront and dismantle racial injustice in society and themselves.

A groundbreaking memoir that blends personal narrative with rigorous theory, charting Maggie Nelson’s queer romance, pregnancy, and the politics of love and family.

**2014 da Vinci Eye Finalist** **ForeWord Reviews‘ 2012 Book of the Year Award Finalist** **2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist** “The message in the so-sick-it muse ic is all on the cover, O’Jays style. The bills are pressing but this book (a We) can help you (Now!) gain a stamp of heritage, your own postal traveling shoes, in the office of International (if not Domestic) Acceptance especially if the real tradition, a mature Langston Hughes in a hat, frames your introduction.” —*Boston Review* “Hand feels Simone’s life as if she herself is living it; as if Simone’s ghosts have leapt into her—and she makes artful poems as their hearts beat in her own body.” —*The Mom Egg* “Hand varies the form and voices in her poems deftly into a contemporary blues that speaks to a woman’s creative challenges within the streams of family that flows in unpredictable rhythms.” —*On the Seawall* “…like ‘two souls in a duet.'” —*Library Journal* “When a poem is good, I feel it in my body…a commotion in my pit…this is a collection of commotion.” —*Yes, Poetry* “Monica A. Hand’s *me and Nina* is a beautiful book by a soul survivor. In these poems she sings deep songs of violated intimacy and the hard work of repair. The poems are unsentimental, blood-red, and positively true, note for note, like the singing of Nina Simone herself. Hand has written a moving, deeply satisfying, and unforgettable book.” —Elizabeth Alexander “In *me and Nina* Monica A. Hand depicts, as Nina Simone did, what it is to be gifted and Black in America. She shifts dynamically through voices and forms homemade, received and re-imagined to conjure the music (and Muses) of art and experience. This is a debut fiercely illuminated by declaration and song.” —Terrance Hayes “Monica A. Hand sings us a crushed velvet requiem of Nina Simone. She plumbs Nina’s mysterious bluesline while recounting the scars of her own overcoming. Hand joins the chorus of shouters like Patricia Smith and Wanda Coleman in this searchlight of a book, bearing her voice like a torch for all we’ve gained and lost in the heat of good song.” ―Tyehimba Jess

Nikki Giovanni’s lyrical poems celebrate everyday moments—family, love, memory—using food as a powerful metaphor for sustenance, passion, and remembrance.

A bold exploration of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression through verse, prose, and dialogue.

A collection of poems by Maya Angelou, capturing the pain and triumph of being black and speaking out about history, heartbreak, and love.

"Camille Rankine's debut collection is a series of provocations and explorations. Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of race, doubt, and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms."From "Symptoms of Aftermath":...When I am saved, a slim nurse leans out of the white light. I need to hear your voice, sweetheart. I see my escape. I walk into the water. The sky is blue like the ocean, which is blue like the sky.Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem"--

An anthology of over four decades of hip‑hop poetry, showcasing the voices that shaped the generation, their culture, music, and style.

Suicide would appear to be the last taboo. Even incest is now discussed freely in the popular media, but the suicide of a loved one is still an act most people are unable to talk about - or even to admit to their closest family and friends. This is just one of the many painful and paralyzing truths author Carla Fine discovered when her husband, a successful young physician, took his own life in December 1989. And being unable to speak openly and honestly about the cause of her pain made it all the more difficult for her to survive. With No Time to Say Goodbye, she brings suicide survival from the darkness into the light, speaking frankly and with compassion about the overwhelming feelings of confusion, guilt, shame, anger, and loneliness that are shared by all survivors. Drawing on her own experience and on conversations with many other survivors - as well as on the knowledge of counselors and mental health professionals - Carla Fine offers a strong helping hand and invaluable guidance to the thousands of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, friends and lovers who are left behind each year, struggling to make sense of an act that seems to them senseless, and to pick up the pieces of their own shattered lives. And, perhaps most important, she allows them to see that they are not alone in their feelings of grief and despair.