To Be Named Something Else
Poems that double as cookouts, as waiting rooms, as parties, as clinics, as hair braiding shops, as church houses, as bodegas, as heaven, as nightclub restrooms, as funerals, as cotillions, as birthing rooms, as ______.
The collection centers a kind of coming-of-age and being for one and many Black femmes in Harlem and other urban landscapes. Every poem speaks to the others--it is all call and response--there is always a black someone asking, a black someone answering. The poems know, remember, and document those names, call them "something else", to mean their own, alive, and always here. They pull from and are in conversation with pop culture, oral histories as told by elders, Hip Hop and R&B, spoken and overheard language, inherited and invented poem forms, the spirits of a Black Baptist tradition, and the echoes of so many Black women writers who have made these kinds of documents before.
The collection centers a kind of coming-of-age and being for one and many Black femmes in Harlem and other urban landscapes. Every poem speaks to the others--it is all call and response--there is always a black someone asking, a black someone answering. The poems know, remember, and document those names, call them "something else", to mean their own, alive, and always here. They pull from and are in conversation with pop culture, oral histories as told by elders, Hip Hop and R&B, spoken and overheard language, inherited and invented poem forms, the spirits of a Black Baptist tradition, and the echoes of so many Black women writers who have made these kinds of documents before.
Winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize --To Be Named Something Else is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage—both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems aren’t—we’re dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin’ those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin’ the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . . To Be Named Something Else is a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. It’s tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply.” Phenix’s full-throated poetry, with its “superlative combination of formalism and funk,” is assuredly something else.
—Patricia Smith, Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series Judge
praise / holdings / loves
“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
“This is the kind of poetry collection I ache for. Shaina Phenix’s invigorating debut alchemizes the properties of human spirit and generational circumstance to challenge perceptions about the contemporary American Black femme experience. Through a process of transmutation, the poems blend the personal with cultural criticism in a way that feels sacred, holy—like something a priestess-type could manage. Phenix refuses to forget from where and whom she comes. From biblical verse to new verse, poetic form to poetic deconstruction, in lyric and shape, this collection feels like a masterfully creative study of artistry, politic, inheritance, and sexuality in Black American Lit.”
—Faylita Hicks, author of HoodWitch
“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
“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
“This is the kind of poetry collection I ache for. Shaina Phenix’s invigorating debut alchemizes the properties of human spirit and generational circumstance to challenge perceptions about the contemporary American Black femme experience. Through a process of transmutation, the poems blend the personal with cultural criticism in a way that feels sacred, holy—like something a priestess-type could manage. Phenix refuses to forget from where and whom she comes. From biblical verse to new verse, poetic form to poetic deconstruction, in lyric and shape, this collection feels like a masterfully creative study of artistry, politic, inheritance, and sexuality in Black American Lit.”
—Faylita Hicks, author of HoodWitch
“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