Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work
Ama Codjoe's highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.
Codjoe's poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe's making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.
Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe's poems ask what the act of looking does to a person-public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one's self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: "There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea," Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. "I want to be seen clearly or not at all."
"The end of the world has ended," Codjoe's speaker announces, "and desire is still / all I crave."
Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.
Table of Contents:
I.
Blueprint
On Seeing and Being
Seen
Two Girls
Bathing
Marigolds of
Fire
Labor
Poem After Betye
Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima
Diamondback
“After the __________,
I yearned to be reckless. To
smash”
Detail from “Poem
After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima”
Primordial
Mirror
Le Sacre du
printemps
“After the __________,
I had the urge to
dance”
II.
She
Said
III.
Posing
Nude
Burying Seeds
At the Fish House
Why I Left the Garden
“After the __________,
I mothered my
mother”
Facing
Off
“After the __________,
time turned like a mood
ring.”
Resembling Flowers
Resembling
Weeds
Of Being in
Motion
“After the
laughter subsided the crying kept after we held
hands”
Heaven as Olympic
Spa
IV.
Bluest Nude
Bathers with a
Turtle
Slow Drag with
Branches of Pine
Lotioning My Mother’s
Back
Aubade
A Family Woven Like
Night through
Trees
Etymology of a
Mood
Poem After an
Iteration of a Painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Destroyed by the Artist
Herself
Head on Ice
#5
After a Year of
Forgetting
“There is a scar near
my right eye no lover ever
noticed”
Notes
About the Author :
Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude. She is also the author of Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. Codjoe’s work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry. She lives in New York City.
Review :
Praise for Bluest Nude
“In this frequently gripping debut, Codjoe offers precisely crafted poems dealing with desire, memory, art, and ancestry.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Fiercely intelligent and both emotionally and formally rich.”—Library Journal
"The hotly burning poems in Codjoe’s debut collection collapse themes of color and body into a lyrical supernova.”—Booklist, starred review
"Bluest Nude is a heady mix of ekphrastic and archival poems…Codjoe conjures the unmistakable textures of Black Americana."—Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation
“If seeing were easy, we wouldn’t need poetry. That’s one of the implications of Ama Codjoe’s startling debut, Bluest Nude. The poems are portraits—glimpses—of a poet who wants ‘to be seen clearly or not at all.’... [Bluest Nude is] steeped brilliantly in the urgency of the contemporary hunger to know what we really are. There’s a quiet joy possible, too, in that difficult pursuit.”—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney’s
“Bluest Nude insists on the personal. Codjoe’s ‘I’ is vibrant and alive, clear in its existence as an individuated lens. Wonderfully, this foregrounding of the first-person does not prohibit a sense of a collective, but rather enforces it.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Bluest Nude is a portrait of Black female desire and embodied love that will leave you closer to your own core. Codjoe uses a language so emotionally clear and nourishing that I felt physically hungry for it.”—The Common
“Bluest Nude is a sensual, seductive, and luminous collection of poetry that draws the reader in with tenderness, vulnerability, and desire. These poems simultaneously satisfy while leaving you with an aching need for more.”—Christine Bollow, Between Drafts
"How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze. In appetite and loss, rage and praise, what animates these poems is a profound cherishing, an abiding (and yet at every turn surprising) love rushing out from the lush wilderness of Ama Codjoe's rapturous imagination. Bluest Nude is an ecstatic encounter."—Tracy K. Smith
"Sensual, sound-driven, and brimming with a necessary truth, the poems in Bluest Nude are pulsating with both grief and beauty. Wrought out of resurrection and reclaiming, these brilliant poems honor the mystery and legacy of the body. Codjoe has written a true triumph of a debut that feels urgent and deeply human."—Ada Limon
"It is hard to find words for the fineness of Ama Codjoe's poetry, its unabashed and luminous vibrancy. She unframes old myths about beauty and femininity and care to bring them intimately into the experience of the body where she forges far more supple visions. Her language is so rich and resourceful that, as it enlarges lyric possibilities, it also enlarges human ones. Never have I been so convinced that the desire to know oneself and the desire to be the agent of one's own radical self-making can be audacious and brilliant collaborators."—Mary Szybist
“Codjoe’s poems made me ache in the best way. These poems call forward our many mothers—in pictures and pages—they create a vibrant salon pulsing with the confidence of a poet’s urgent, material response. Exquisitely balanced between premonition and memory, Bluest Nude is a gathering and conjuring of improvisation and reflection, sensuality and joy, call and response.”—Ellen Gallagher
Praise for Ama Codjoe
"Yes, listen. Listen.
Ama Codjoe’s writing is too eloquent not the hear.”—Ed Roberson, from the
introduction to Blood of the Air
“At the heart of
Codjoe’s poems in her first chapbook, Blood of the Air, is a real
heart, pumping, working the blood of life—good blood, bad blood—out. . . .
Codjoe’s poems, her re-framings, are full of care and kindness for the speakers
of the poems, imagined or not, in their reveries, in their vulnerabilities, in
their angers. The quieter poems press your hand with such intention when they
skip—never a surprise CD skip from an accidental scratch; a practiced boxer’s
skip.”—Adroit Journal
“Codjoe’s poetry
offers a brief, powerful intersection where the subjects of her poems
illustrate how some issues recur again and again throughout the human
experience. In times like these, when blood and air are porous elements that we
fear, we see how they are ancient and necessary, too.”—Tara Betts
“ Codjoe’s
extraordinary debut poetry chapbook, Blood of the Air, conveys a
sense of urgency, vulnerability, and Codjoe’s mastery of the poetic craft. . .
. Blood of the Air explores narratives of women and women
figures who have lived, lost, resisted, been subject to breaking and other
people’s definitions, and who have reclaimed their breaths and freedom.”—Nadia
Alexis
