Blue Opening: Poems

Blue Opening: Poems - Paperback

$18.00
$18.00
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Blue Opening: Poems
  • Blue Opening: Poems
Blue Opening: Poems - Paperback

Blue Opening: Poems - Paperback

by Chet'la Sebree
$18.00
$18.00

Book Overview

Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Poetry Finalist

"A profound poetic talent."--Ada Limón

Blue Opening, Chet'la Sebree's brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins--of illness, of language, of the universe--as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.

With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is "unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith."
ISBN9781963108460
Author Chet'la Sebree
PublisherTin House
GenreLiterature and Family
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages96
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

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About Chet'la Sebree

Chet'la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, Field Study, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry. Her essays and poems have been anthologized in Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain's Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Kwame Alexander's This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and others. Sebree is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.

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