Bluest Nude: Poems (Paperback)

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary WorkAma 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 looki