Black Metamorphoses

Black Metamorphoses, invites a reckoning of the past inviting readers to sift through known and unknown parts of history through verse, collective historical memory, and mythos of the forcibly traveled Black body.

Black Metamorphoses pierces a 2000+ year-old veil inspired by a range of Ovidian myths while resisting a direct conversion of the work. This collection explores the Black psyche, body, soul, through inversion and brazen confrontation of work that has shaped Western civilization. In a poetic range of forms, voices, and rhythms, the reader is bathed in ancestral memory, myth, and sense of the timeless of the shapeshifting, resilient Black body. This complete volume of work enters into another level of conversation with original interior illustrations created by visual artist Alan Blackwell. These illustrations create an additional kind of text and layer of mythos for the reader.