Ama Codjoe\'s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love.
Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning..
The end of the world has ended, Codjoe\'s speaker announces, and desire is still / all I crave.
I want to be seen clearly or not at all.
What does it mean to see while being seen? In Poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea, Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem.
Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe\'s Poems ask what the act of looking does to a person--public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one\'s self.
Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.
From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe\'s making.
Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self.
Codjoe\'s Poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon , be silent , be selfless , reproduce .
Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life .
Ama Codjoe\'s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love
