Super Sad Black Girl

(Paperback)

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Description

Diamond Sharps Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where her speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in the hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free

Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the Other Side, as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police violence.

is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

Reviews

Ive never read a collection of writingpoetry or otherwisethat spoke so clearly to what it feels like to live with a bipolar brain. Diamond Sharp has done what has often felt like the impossible: she has translated what so many of us have experienced into something so jaw droppingly familiar and achingly beautiful that you cant escape the truth of it. More than just merely feeling seen, this collection made me feel heard and held and understood. Sharp is a master of her craft and this book is a testimony and a song.
Bassey Ikpi, author of Im Telling the Truth but Im Lying

Deeply interior, alarmingly vivid, and full of dreamlike lyricism, this singular debut invites a reclamation of confessionalism for Black girls livingtrying to livetoday. Armed with Gwendolyns deceptive simplicity and some Henny and anchored by Sharps musical, crystalline voice and the subtle comedy of truth, Super Sad Black Girl is a wholly original collection that begs to be read, felt, and read again.
Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro

Diamond Sharps debut work offers the dazzling, taut simplicity of Lucille Clifton with a voice all her own. Here, the poet mines the interiority of a Black woman perpetually in flight while living with bipolar disorder, flitting smartly between mania, psychosis, stability, social exile and belonging. With Sharps stunningly controlled meditation on Black womens abiding fugitivity while in conversation with Chicago luminaries Hansberry, Brooks, and Walker, as well as Black women slain at the hands of police, Super Sad Black Girl offers the notion that maybe the freest place for Black women is not a definitive physical plane but in the company of one another.
Erika Dickerson-Despenza, playwright, educator, and organizer

Although Sharp has an extensive background in music criticism, theres little doubt that poetry is her raison dtre. Her poems are funny, unpretentious, and profoundly self- accepting.
M.T. Richards, Chicago Magazine

Author Bio

Diamond Sharp is a writer from Chicago and an alumna of Wellesley College. She is an editor at Bandcamp and a former editor at Rookie. Her work has been featured on Chicago Public Radio and Poetry Foundation, as well as in New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, PANK, and elsewhere.