Super Sad Black Girl

By Diamond Sharp

Diamond Sharp’s 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. 

Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies, as she struggles to find a place, a time, where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly with her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Dec 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642598650

Book preview

© 2022 Diamond Sharp

Published in 2022 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-64259-865-0

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email [e-mail] for more information.

Cover artwork: Split Hem by Angela Davis Fegan

Cover design by Jamie Kerry.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

This book is dedicated to my grandparents, Eugene and Mildred Hill.

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

—Lorraine Hansberry

contents

I

Lorraine and Cognac

Exile

Exile #2

Tired

Purgatory Room

Purgatory Room #2

Purgatory Room #3

Touch

The Golden Shovel

Maud Martha

The Other Side

Portal

Free and Heavy

Leaving

Stay

II

Super Sad Black Girl

Black Girls from the Future