“To Be Named Something Else is a collection that at once seems to have arrived from another world and is yet, clearly and deliberately, built from the incandescent materials of Black social life. These poems speak to the ancestors we know and love, the undaunted bards still walking among us, the sites and sounds of the Black quotidian rendered more surreal by Shaina Phenix’s honed attention. This book lives in a space all its own. It is a song of grief, flight, and ongoing overcoming.”

—Joshua Bennett, author of  The Sobbing School

“Shaina Phenix’s expansive practice flourishes at the intersections of many things. Here is a book of poems, a book of prayers—part choreopoem, part lineage song—a trace of Black femme becomings. Phenix ferries such sonic multiplicities into the blackest ink of this gathering ground steeped in Black feminist practices and reminds us of the discipline of imagining that some prayers can be. Virtuosic, lush, mystical, vexed, ablaze. To Be Named Something Else is fierce with the urgency of survival and also so in touch with its inner starlight, as in: ‘I find myself thinking, that girl is something else. Find myself / thinking that girl is a little mouth of God.’”

—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria