Bluest Nude: Poems

(Paperback)

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Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoes highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

Codjoes poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoes making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoes poems ask what the act of looking does to a personpublic looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at ones self. 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. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.

The end of the world has ended, Codjoes speaker announces, and desire is still / all I crave.

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

Reviews

Praise for Bluest Nude

In this frequently gripping debut, Codjoe offers precisely crafted poems dealing with desire, memory, art, and ancestry.Publishers Weekly, starred review

Fiercely intelligent and both emotionally and formally rich.Library Journal

"The hotly burning poems in Codjoes debut collection collapse themes of color and body into a lyrical supernova.Booklist, starred review

"Bluest Nude is a heady mix of ekphrastic and archival poemsCodjoe conjures the unmistakable textures of Black Americana."Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation

If seeing were easy, we wouldnt need poetry. Thats one of the implications of Ama Codjoes startling debut, Bluest Nude. The poems are portraitsglimpsesof a poet who wants to be seen clearly or not at all.... [Bluest Nude is] steeped brilliantly in the urgency of the contemporary hunger to know what we really are. Theres a quiet joy possible, too, in that difficult pursuit.Jesse Nathan, McSweeneys

Bluest Nude insists on the personal. Codjoes I is vibrant and alive, clear in its existence as an individuated lens. Wonderfully, this foregrounding of the first-person does not prohibit a sense of a collective, but rather enforces it.Los Angeles Review of Books

Bluest Nude is a portrait of Black female desire and embodied love that will leave you closer to your own core. Codjoe uses a language so emotionally clear and nourishing that I felt physically hungry for it.The Common

Bluest Nude is a sensual, seductive, and luminous collection of poetry that draws the reader in with tenderness, vulnerability, and desire. These poems simultaneously satisfy while leaving you with an aching need for more.Christine Bollow, Between Drafts

"How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze. In appetite and loss, rage and praise, what animates these poems is a profound cherishing, an abiding (and yet at every turn surprising) love rushing out from the lush wilderness of Ama Codjoe's rapturous imagination. Bluest Nude is an ecstatic encounter."Tracy K. Smith

"Sensual, sound-driven, and brimming with a necessary truth, the poems in Bluest Nude are pulsating with both grief and beauty. Wrought out of resurrection and reclaiming, these brilliant poems honor the mystery and legacy of the body. Codjoe has written a true triumph of a debut that feels urgent and deeply human."Ada Limon

"It is hard to find words for the fineness of Ama Codjoe's poetry, its unabashed and luminous vibrancy. She unframes old myths about beauty and femininity and care to bring them intimately into the experience of the body where she forges far more supple visions. Her language is so rich and resourceful that, as it enlarges lyric possibilities, it also enlarges human ones. Never have I been so convinced that the desire to know oneself and the desire to be the agent of one's own radical self-making can be audacious and brilliant collaborators."Mary Szybist

Codjoes poems made me ache in the best way. These poems call forward our many mothersin pictures and pagesthey create a vibrant salon pulsing with the confidence of a poets urgent, material response. Exquisitely balanced between premonition and memory,Bluest Nudeis a gathering and conjuring of improvisation and reflection, sensuality and joy, call and response.Ellen Gallagher

Praise for Ama Codjoe

"Yes, listen. Listen. Ama Codjoes writing is too eloquent not the hear.Ed Roberson, from the introduction toBlood of the Air

At the heart of Codjoes poems in her first chapbook,Blood of the Air, is a real heart, pumping, working the blood of lifegood blood, bad bloodout. . . . Codjoes poems, her re-framings, are full of care and kindness for the speakers of the poems, imagined or not, in their reveries, in their vulnerabilities, in their angers. The quieter poems press your hand with such intention when they skipnever a surprise CD skip from an accidental scratch; a practiced boxers skip.Adroit Journal

Codjoes poetry offers a brief, powerful intersection where the subjects of her poems illustrate how some issues recur again and again throughout the human experience. In times like these, when blood and air are porous elements that we fear, we see how they are ancient and necessary, too.Tara Betts

Codjoes extraordinary debut poetry chapbook,Blood of the Air, conveys a sense of urgency, vulnerability, and Codjoes mastery of the poetic craft. . . .Blood of the Airexplores narratives of women and women figures who have lived, lost, resisted, been subject to breaking and other peoples definitions, and who have reclaimed their breaths and freedom.Nadia Alexis

Author Bio

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude. She is also the author of Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Codjoes work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry. She lives in New York City.