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2 books match the query 'We See'

cover of We See We

We See We

Melba Joyce Boyd

University of Michigan Press, 2027

Michigan poet laureate Melba Joyce Boyd’s tenth poetry collection, We See We, is a deeply emplaced volume, grounded in Boyd’s hometown of Detroit. The book takes its title from a poem in the collection dedicated to the late photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker Hugh Grannum, who trained his camera on Black Detroit. Boyd takes a similar approach in this volume, collecting poems “about seeing our collective selves within our interconnected individual lives.” Divided into two sections—Inflexions and Elegies—the poems evoke Detroit’s past and present through works about Romare Bearden at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Idlewild, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, Aretha Franklin, John Sinclair, and the varied lives of people Boyd knew and loved who demonstrate that you do not have to be famous to have historical impact. As former Michigan poet laureate Nandi Comer writes in the interview that concludes the volume, the poems in this collection are “filled with artists, friends, elders, and collaborators,” making the poems in the collection into “an education in Detroit’s artistic life.”

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cover of We See with the Skin: On Zora Neale Hurston's Methodology

We See with the Skin

On Zora Neale Hurston's Methodology

Roshanak Kheshti

Duke University Press, 2026

Roshanak Kheshti opens her book with a line from one of Zora Neale Hurston’s earliest stories: “we see with the skin.” From this brief but potent line, Kheshti examines how Hurston’s understanding of Black skin as both seen and seeing offers radical insight into racialized perception and Black consciousness. Kheshti follows Hurston’s travels across the back woods of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana as a filmmaker and sensory ethnographer of the African diasporic spiritual practice of hoodoo. Through her travels, Hurston encountered a sensibility that could animate the object status of being colored with the power of a return gaze. Kheshti considers both how Hurston poetically exploited the synesthetic logic at the heart of race thinking—being colored—and how her embodied performance ethnography catalogued an outside to that logic. We See with the Skin is an original mapping of Hurston’s synesthetic theory and its broader implications for understanding minoritarian perception and thought.
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