In the spring of 2020, when the world beyond our homes felt unrecognizable, an organically formed collective of Black women and non-Black women scholars, poets, teachers, and artists began to meet virtually to read poetry together. Soon, the poets joined us. Remarkably, every poet we invited, including Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Nikky Finney, Lauren K. Alleyne, DaMaris B. Hill, Chet’la Sebree, Kiki Petrosino, Bettina Judd, Destiny O. Birdsong, Nate Marshall, Phillip B. Williams, Tara Betts, Roger Reeves, Adrian Matejka, and Jericho Brown, said “yes” and showed up aglow in luminous generosity. Amid ongoing global catastrophes, we built a powerful virtual community with these award-winning, overlooked, and on-the-rise poets and with each other. The Honeyfish Collective space was also never designed to hew to a traditional methodology for explicating poetry but instead to draw on the lyric page as we collectively envisaged a Black feminist elsewhere—a methodology that is especially salient, even necessary in an era characterized by precarity and peril.  

While literary criticism carries the mystique of the singular theorist, The Honeyfish Collective recognizes that interacting with and processing poetry is almost always an embodied experience appreciated within communal settings—at a reading, in our classrooms, in a workshop, at a conference, and in all the informal dialogues with colleagues and friends that become the foundation for meaning-making. Moreover, adhering to the conventions of supposed critical neutrality often forecloses affective and somatic engagements with poetry that are visionary, even ecstatic. In The Honeyfish Collective Presents Fieldnotes on Contemporary Black Poetry, we develop a relational, dialogic method for reading and scholarship that centers poets in the project of Black feminist worldbuilding. Through a literary collage of autotheoretical fieldnotes and conversational hotbeds that fluidly merge and mingle “I” and “we,” The Honeyfish Collective asks of ourselves, our featured poets, and our readers: How might holistic and dialogic reading methods be transformative?   

The Honeyfish Collective reading list: 

•Alleyne, Lauren K. Honeyfish. New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2019.

•Betts, Tara. Refuse to Disappear. The Word Works, 2022.

•Birdsong, Destiny O. Negotiations: Poems. Tin House Books, 2020.

•Brown, Jericho. The Tradition. Later Printing edition, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.

•Finney, Nikky. Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts. TriQuarterly, 2020.

•Hill, DaMaris B. A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

•Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Age of Phillis. Wesleyan University Press, 2022.

•Judd, Bettina. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought. Northwestern University Press, 2022.

•—. patient. Black Lawrence Press, 2014.

•Maner, Sequoia. Little Girl Blue: Poems. Host Publications, 2021.

•Marshall, Nate. Finna: Poems. One World, 2020.

•Matejka, Adrian. Somebody Else Sold the World. Penguin, 2021. 

•Petrosino, Kiki. White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia. Sarabande Books, 2020.

•scott, darlene anita. Marrow: Poems. University Press of Kentucky, 2022.

•Sebree, Chet’la. Mistress. New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2019.

•Williams, Phillip B. Mutiny. Penguin Books, 2021.