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.

Thiahera Nurse is a poet and educator from Hollis,Queens. Her work can be found in The Offing, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Poets House Fellow. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin. Her chapbook “Some Girls Survive On Their Sorcery Alone” is available now. She writes for the black girls.

1 – Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone – Thiahera Nurse and Reginald Gibbons (Northwestern University Press, 2019)

2 – Present Conditions – Joseph Massey (Hollyridge Press, 2018)

3 – The Blue Nib Chapbook 5 – Adam Levon, Ross McCague, Teresa Godfrey (The Blue Nib, 2020)

4 – Next Hood Over – Hazel The Aura, Sean Hanrahan, Josh Martin (Toho Publishing, 2020)

5 – The Maze To My Heart – Alexis M Romo (Alexis Monique Romo, 2020)

6 – Two – Emma Catlin (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018)

7 – The Cows – Lydia Davis (Sarabande Books, 2011)

8 – (Once) Suppressed – Aisha Rose (Independently published, 2018)

9 – Maybe, someday – Becca Noel (Independently published)

10 – Fly on a Wall – Richard Milton Grahn (Independently published, 2019)