Cheryl’s Latest Work
Available in Bookstores Everywhere!
Interviews & Reviews
Rage and Remedy in “We Are Not Wearing Helmets”,
– Meredith Boe, Chicago Review of Books, February 21, 2022
MER – Motherhood, Literature & Art,
– Glenis Redmond, Mom Egg Review, July 2, 2022
Order here:
> TriQuarterly Press
> Greenlight Bookstore
> Amazon
> in the UK & Europe, Waterstones
“We Are Not Wearing Helmets builds upon and forwards the legacy of African American and women poets such as Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Adrienne Rich. These are poems of memory, narrative poems that are both confessional and political. They document the poet’s own trajectory of becoming a writer, speak to the loss of her son and to motherhood, celebrate womanhood, and honor Black history and call for racial justice in the (now growing) tradition of poetry inspired by Black Lives Matter. I was particularly struck by the sequence of poems that are, in essence, odes to women-Black women, queer women, mothers. Whether the women she is writing about are figures from her life or the women authors she reads, we come to know these women and get a sense of the magic the poet feels in their presence.” -Vincent Toro, author of Tertulia
“‘I follow the hurricane path through the middle passage,’ writes Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. In a nation that either ignores history or treats it as a spectacle, Boyce-Taylor confronts the enormities that have been erased from our self-knowledge. ‘To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger,’ James Baldwin wrote, and these beautiful poems come at an aching cost: ‘every day I carry a dark river in my hands.’ Yet-maybe it isn’t a paradox-Boyce-Taylor’s lines glisten with joy and blessing. We Are Not Wearing Helmets is a work of visceral complexity and visionary urgency. In any age, this book would be vital. In ours, the actuality is searing.” -D. Nurkse, author of Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult
“Lifetimes of ancestor-breath, sweat, tears and dreams have realized themselves in the manifestation of these moving poems, peppered with the parlance of a homeland ever distant, never far. Graceful, gritty, crisp, authentic: this work is just the mirror and balm that the world needs right now. Never have we needed this collection more than this moment, these poems that demonstrate how the personal is the political, how relevance becomes timelessness. Full of shadow and shimmer with surprising punches and kisses that land clean, these poems spill blood and hold light all the same.” -Samantha Thornhill, coauthor of Watch Me Swing
“Here are flowers and their attendant fragrances: hope, heartbreak, pleasure, longing. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor offers a living archive that includes the dead, a loving archive that retains love’s complexity, a catalog of moments that cannot end. Enjoy this book and keep it in a place where you can see it. Maybe somewhere you would keep a carefully arranged bloom of flowers. It will continue to remind you of what life is: beautiful, specific, and too often cut short.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony
“Oh, how I love Cheryl Boyce-Taylor and the way she writes the whole world into existence. Sensual, vivid, radical, and alive, this book is the resistance we need right now. ‘Defiant in our righteousness,’ these poems do not hold back. They electrify and ignite. They light the way home, urge us to confront the complicated and comfort us when we arrive. Blooming with such tender mother love, love for home, for her people, community, for Black history, womanhood and for the poets who traveled before. Self-assured, sharp, and always seeing, We Are Not Wearing Helmets is a calling, a gathering ground, required reading for all of us looking to find ourselves and where we belong. ‘Use it as clarity / use it as affirmation.'” -Ellen Hagan, author of Blooming Fiascoes: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2021)
Order
> Haymarket Books
> Harriett’s Bookshop
> Amazon
“A teacher begets a teacher and a poet begets a poet. This book is the embodiment of pure love, grace and hope. Herein, Mama Phife aka Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has given us a gift about her greatest gift, her son Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor. Malik was a great storyteller. To say he got it from his mama is an understatement. He was a treasure to me and Cheryl’s writings and memoirs help to comfort the place that misses him greatly. I thank her for this book and for still teaching us… like her mother before her.” -Ali Shaheed Muhammad, A Tribe Called Quest
“I am eternally hopeful that more people in the world come to terms with understanding that for anyone to share an experience of grief is a true generosity. With Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor allows a reader to bask in the generosity. The sharing of loss and grief is the building of a bridge that others who have experienced that specific loss can cross. This is a book about losing a child, yes. But beyond that, it is a book of tactile emotions, and a singularly musical writing, which Boyce-Taylor has always done so well. Above all, Mama Phife Represents shows anyone who has lost someone how to make the most of memory, and the most of their own survival.” -Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
“‘All around are unhinged bones / wailing at the lip of sea.’ And: ‘I’ve stitched your breath / to my throat.’ Such lines carry the loss of the writer’s beautiful son out of which emerges this book of love, of joy, of grief, but also of plenty. Through poems, letters, photographs, and other communications, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has gathered an exquisite record of this Great love between mother and son, artist and artist. Quietly I say to you here: It is like nothing else I have quite read. An elegy, an epic, a duet. A motherhand gathering the lastings. We are so utterly fortunate to witness this immense devotion, and in that witnessing be changed by yet another glimpse of deepest love and what it makes possible.” -Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
“Malik Phife Dawg Taylor represents everything that’s beautiful about Hip-Hop. I had the honor of meeting his mother Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, the poet, long before I met him. She inspired me to become a better artist. When I became a professional artist, Malik was one of my biggest supporters. Without them, I don’t know if I would be the artist I am today. This book is like a piece of me.” -Talib Kweli, Hip-Hop Artist
“Mama Phife Represents is an intimate and heartbreaking tribute to Boyce-Taylor’s son, Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor. Not only does Boyce-Taylor deftly humanize the hip-hop superhero, but she also logs every fragile emotion in both eulogy and celebration: so much so that ‘she will travel to Anguilla/ beg Yemaya to bring him back.’ The light that the poet finds on this journey is nearly unfathomable, but always redemptive. This collection is a monument, and I am grateful for it.” -Michael Cirelli, CEO of Urban Word National Youth Poet Laureate Program
“Mama Phife Represents is at once a memoir and a living archive of one man’s extraordinary life and his mother’s love and pain in the face of his loss. At a time in the United States when so many black mothers are losing their black children – through illness and violence – this book stands as a testament to the deep, ground-shifting impact of that loss across generations. Honest, Healing, Timely.” -Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, poet, novelist, and scholar
“These poems shred and rebuild. They keen and holler, they are not ashamed. Not afraid. They drill hard to the marrow of suffering and rise up alive. Singing. A mourning song, yes, but a song. It is sometimes “the crude voice of earth’s sorrow,” but it also, and always, unmistakably and unshakably Cheryl’s. The poet, the mother, the wife, the lover, singing into her own, and by extension the world’s survival and renewal and re-blooming. If we are lucky, someday someone will say of each of us when we are lost, ‘all the stars have followed after you.'” -Marty McConnell
Finalist for the 2018 Peterson Poetry Prize…
~ ARRIVAL ~
Published by Northwestern University Press
Interviews & Reviews
Anton Nimblett “What She Name?”, Mom Egg Review
Rajiv Mohabir – Waxwingmag, Issue XIV, Spring 2018
Order
> Amazon
> Barnes & Noble
> Northwestern University Press
“Boyce-Taylor’s bold new collection slyly and directly engages topics that have preoccupied major poets for centuries-mortality, cultural heritage, blood belonging, alienation, love, and the challenge of holding nature to the page. Readers will be enriched and enlivened by the grace and compassion at the heart of this casually polyphonic artist.”” – Colin Channer, author of Providential and The Girl with the Golden Shoes
“Cheryl Boyce Taylor will sweep you up in her pages with the scent of language. She will present you with what the craft of poetry can offer: precise, glowing, and painfully beautiful language set to a cadence that moves inside the body even after the poem has closed. A stunning contribution to contemporary poetry!” – Kimiko Hahn, author of Brain Fever
To order Cheryl’s Limited Edition companion CD, contact her at cheryl.arrivalpoems@gmail.com.
Preview track, Roy
Previous Publications
Convincing the Body
Night When Moon Follows
Cheryl’s First CD, Mango Pretty
