But ultimately, I’m so thankful to that poem, because through writing it, I came to realize that everything my body has ever done, from its first cell division, to its first breath, to the fact I can feel it shelving the slice of cheesecake I just finished – everything has been to keep me alive. And in a world that has not always cared about that, and in contrast with a mind that has not always wanted that, I’m humbled and grateful for its faithfulness.
– Isabelle Baafi

I’m telling the truth about how I feel and experience the world. When that resonates with another human being, it is such a gift. But when it comes to my poetry, specifically, that isn’t why I write it. I write it to heal. In it, I am finding the words for pain. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t continue to have its echoes and effects. There are certainly moments when visiting a poem is a kind of picking at a scar. – Nica Cornell

The journey through history – personal, global, and planet – through one beautifully simple poem is to me the height of the poetic craft. Your juxtaposition of pleasure and death held in a historical and present casing of exploitative labour, slavery, and environmental destruction, is palpable in the air around the poem. I suppose that it is this layering that led me into African poetry – Sarah Godsell

It’s very interesting to me that when we say poetry, we don’t say fiction or nonfiction, we just say poetry. And it feels very true to the form that the distinction is not clearly defined. – Sara Elkamel

And maybe part of the privilege of their conversations about the separation of the holistic individuality of the artist from their art was based on them not really having to think about their whiteness extensively. – Cheswayo Mphanza