Queer Reader is back! Join us monthly for our new series hosted by our teammate Mariah. We are so excited to be back and cannot wait to continue building community with you.

This month, we are reading Blue Hallelujahs by Cynthia Manick

As you’re reading Blue Hallelujahs by Cynthia Manick, consider the ways the poems exist in opposition to racism, sexism, imperialism and queerphobia. In what ways is Cynthia Manick’s own identity reclaimed through her poetry and storytelling? How do southernness and queerness coexist?

Here is what others had to say about Blue Hallelujahs:

What we remember is what we become. Rocking chairs holding mothers and “animals that root the ground for peaches, bones and stars.” In Blue Hallelujahs Cynthia Manick holds fast to what brought us across. These are not the things you will hear about Black people on the nightly news. But they remain the things that lock the arms of Black people around Black people when we need what we need to keep moving on. I am so grateful to this sweet box of sacred words.”

-Nikky Finney, Author of Head Off & Split, Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

Cynthia Manick’s Blue Hallelujahs bring us to a broil like Koko Taylor’s “white-toothed love coils on repeat.” Here, we have a gospel of womanly sharpness, a kitchen sinked and hot combed diary of the way Blues grinds into the 21st century. Gifted with the ability to smolder into surprise and swelter, Manick’s reflections on discovery and loss will bring you to a “slow applause under the skin.” Thank you for this bouquet of sheet music filled with church organ and pistol smoke, Ms. Manick. We gone need it to get to the other side.

-Tyehimba Jess, author of leadbelly, winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series