The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997-2022)

By Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Encompassing the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s astounding career, The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring.

With deep empathy, thoughtfulness, charisma, and lyricism, Boyce-Taylor’s work explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes. Grief is both an anchor and a door throughout Boyce-Taylor’s poetry, as seen in Mama Phife Represents, a hybrid of memoir and verse on the death of her son, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Questions regarding Blackness and Black womanhood in the United States are stitched throughout her books, and Boyce-Taylor leans into a more overtly defiant political register in her latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, while maintaining the connective spine of the Trinidadian dialect that appears throughout all her work. Selections from these books, as well as her other poetry collections, appear in this new volume.

Curated from Boyce-Taylor’s body of work, The Limitless Heart encapsulates her progression as a writer throughout the decades of her highly successful career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888900413

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

<p><strong>Cheryl Boyce-Taylor</strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is the author of five previous collections of poetry&mdash;</span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">We Are Not Wearing Helmets, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Arrival</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">&mdash;and a memoir and poetic tribute to her son, </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mama Phife Represents</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">. A VONA fellow and a teaching artist, Boyce-Taylor is the founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series, and she has led numerous poetry workshops for Cave Canem, the New York Public Library, Urban Word NYC, and Poets House, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.</span></p>

Book preview

Introduction

The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997–2022) is a collection that represents seven books and thirty years of writing. In this collection, I’ve written about migration, Type 1 Diabetes, women’s rights, racism, discrimination, love, poverty, and Black lives that matter. I share my experiences of being a daughter, mother, and wife, and of living as a queer woman. Each collection is in conversation with the book that preceded it. My stories hide very little, because I come from a family that kept many secrets and was not outwardly affectionate. Despite that, we children knew we were loved by the daily sacrifices our parents made to keep us clothed, fed, and educated. In our tiny Caribbean island of Trinidad, an education was the most prized possession a parent could give a child.

As a young girl, I listened as my mom sang, memorized, and recited long poems around our home. She loved poetry, and passed this life-saving gift on to me. I’ve taken the privilege and challenge to remember, as best I can, my childhood journey from Victory Street, Arima, to St. Albans, Queens, and finally my arrival as an adult poet woman in my beloved Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Over the years, some of my writing has been a bit hurtful for my family. They have accused me of telling family secrets in my poems, making them feel exposed. After my grandmother’s death, I realized that her family secrets were also mine to tell. Secrets can keep a woman from maturing and expanding. Healing and growth can only take place when secret wounds are uncovered and allowed to breathe. Poems have sustained me since I was a little