Thiahera Nurse’s Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone works as ode and requiem to document the precious narratives held inside the body of a black girl. Opening with declarations of self-love, beauty, eulogy, and Lil’ Kim rapping in the rain, the landscape of Nurse’s poetry functions equally as underworld and imagined heaven.

Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone sees Renisha McBride, Sandra Bland, Korrynn Gaines, and others not as ornamental nor does the book attempt to canonize the dead women as saints. The poems see them as they are: play-cousins, home-girls, the mirror. Line to line, there is an obsession with keeping all of the women in the poems safe and perhaps resurrectable. The black girl who is alive here lives to switch her waistline to a reggae beat. She is in the middle of the dance floor with a suicide note in her purse as a means of warding off bad juju. Always, she is chasing joy head-on, at warp speed.

Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone is a celebration that the black girl will always dance, in the church basement, a grandmother’s funeral repast—she dances until she hits the floor, in her joy . . . and her grief.

THIAHERA NURSE is from Hollis, Queens, by way of Trinidad and Tobago. She received her M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, Callaloo, The Offing, and in the forthcoming edition of The BreakBeat Poets Anthology. She has received support from Callaloo, Tin House, and The Pink Door Retreat. She is a 2018 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow. She writes for the black girls (the living and the dead).