Suddenly We

Evie Shockley's new poetry collection asks readers to imagine, and to put effort into, a wider sense of who belongs to the first-person plural. Drawing on visual art, sound, and layered language, the poems map possible routes toward shared imagining. They take up a practical question: how can a person pursue their own growth while recognizing that, whoever they are, they exist in relation to others?

The collection begins with the work of Black women visual artists, including Alison Saar and Alma Thomas. From there, the poems build a growing network of links that show how everyone and everything on the planet depends on everything else.

One early poem, perched, is written after Saar's Blue Bird. Its speaker is a young Black woman who feels watched and judged in a world that discourages her. She pictures herself as a tree that changes as it grows, reaching toward a blue, feathered song.