Burning Sugar: Poems

(Paperback)

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Description

In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies. They use poetry to illuminate their activist work: exposing racism, especially anti-Blackness, and helping people see the connections between history and systemic oppression that show up in every human interaction, space, and community. Their poems demonstrate how the world is both beautiful and cruel, a truth that inspires overwhelming anger and aweall of which spills out onto the page to tell the story of a challenging, complex, nuanced, and joyful life.

In Burning Sugar,verse and epistolary, racism and resilience, pain and precarity are flawlessly sewn together by the mighty hands of a Black, queer femme.

This book is the second title to be published under the VS. Books imprint, a series curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya, featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.

Reviews

"Burning Sugar is a vigilant time marker and a vivid place maker. The bearings of colonial violence and of Black resistance are physically present on every page of this debut collection. These poems ask us not only to witness, but to implicitly and accountably feel." --Amber Dawn, author of Sodom Road Exit and My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems

"Burning Sugar is a compelling collection of letters and intimate poetic conversations to and through place. Blain is a careful wordsmith. We are welcomed into an oral history that spirals, burns, narrates, and then--redefines family, diaspora, and queer identity. This book is indeed 'freedom that tastes like lust.'" --Chelene Knight, author of Dear Current Occupant

Cicely Belle Blain's Burning Sugar beautifully narrates a journey over more than lands and waters. Each poem pulls its teeth from the book's title, and offers the soft and deliberate sweetness of what could have been - before the burning. --Jillian Christmas, author of The Gospel of Breaking

Author Bio

Cicely Belle Blain is the CEO of a social justice-informed diversity and inclusion consulting company with more than 100 clients worldwide. They are the founder of Black Lives Matter Vancouver and one of 150 Black women and non-binary people making change across Canada. Cicely Belle is an instructor in executive leadership at Simon Fraser University. Burning Sugar is their first book.