dayliGht: Poems

Written by Roya Marsh

Narrated by Roya Marsh

This program is read by the author

dayliGht is a dazzling collection of poems from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race.

Growing up, Roya Marsh was considered “tomboy passing." With an affinity for baggy clothes, cornrows, and bandanas, she came of age in an era when the wide spectrum of gender and sexuality was rarely acknowledged or discussed. She knew she was “different,” her family knew she was “different,” but anything outside of the heteronorm was either disregarded or disparaged.

In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD x FSG Originals

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250757463

Roya Marsh

Roya Marsh is a Bronx, New York, native and a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator, and activist. She is the Poet in Residence at Urban Word NYC and she works feverishly toward LGBTQIA justice and dismantling white supremacy. Marsh’s work has been featured on NBC, BET, Button Poetry, Write About Now Poetry, Def Jam’s All Def Digital, and in Poetry magazine, Flypaper Magazine, Frontier Poetry, The Village Voice, Nylon, Huff Post, Lexus Verses and Flow, and The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket 2018).

Reviews for dayliGht

[anna · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a brutal, painful book, a voice much needed and I praise the author for it. The audio well serve the parts where she repeats the insults hurled at her to the point that you became her and want to shout, stop! While she describe facts and the pain she undergo she is also able to voice out what our mind constantly tell us, obsessively, the words that nail us. Well described “the tribe of Jesus” and shortly after the Jesus she knows. She touches her pain and delivers it. This book really touched me, in an uncomfortable way at times, others it was just so right on about what women go thru and have to hear. I do recommend it!

[Kay Anne Crawson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Seriously fucking phenomenal poetry. Her poems contained images, words, and phrases that cut through even the most stringent distracted thoughts, and having those was an extremely rare occurrence while listening to this masterful collection 'dayliGht'. Many thanks to the author, from the bottom of my queer heart.