The Black Outside is an ensemble of poems that archives personal and ancestral memory, contextualizing loss and longing in a world created by transatlantic slavery. In these poems, Black ecology is lived and thought across a range of sites, from the “interior gardens” to “grief’s aquatic caves.” At these sites, Priest’s speaker steps through a hole in the fabric of Western reality, a portal to a world outside, a surreal elsewhere. Here, she encounters musicians, philosophers, revolutionaries, and lovers who offer methods of escape and relation with nonhuman life. In an anti-pastoral gesture, Priest tarries around the landscape, refusing to look away and reflecting on her place in larger histories that have inaugurated our changing climate. In doing so, she invites us to understand loneliness as a communal experience, to emancipate ourselves from isolation.

Joy Priest is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Horsepower: Poems.

Redemption
Ghosts in Schools
Sans Souci
Spell to Reverse Loss of Memory
Sans Souci
Soulful Songs Found in Strange Places
Sea of Crises
Sans Souci
The Black Outside
Somewhere on an Interstate in Cleveland (2003)
Reading Frederick Douglass
Grease
This Time I See You
A Personal History of Breathing
We Had Dreams Named After Us
Keats Rides Shotgun
The Black Outside
Theses on the Philosophy of Loneliness
The Black Outside
It’s Beyond Me
Bass
My First Kiss Was in a Choir Room
The Minnie Riperton Collection
My Sister
Desire
Time Lapse
The Black Outside
Where There Is History, We Haunt
The Night Never Ended When One of Us Died
When I See the Stars in the Night Sky
Metaphor as Carpenter Bee
Willie’s Bop
Bass
Outside Memphis
The Black Outside