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A collection of mindfulness poems that celebrate everyday moments, from “one of the wisest and most courageous writers of this generation” (Robert Jones Jr.)
We live in an increasingly busy, destabilizing age, confronted by unceasing horrors. But as acclaimed, award-winning poet and playwright Mahogany L. Browne reminds us, poetry can center us and serve as a balm. Poetry invites us to see and feel, to celebrate the power of lyric and movement.
Browne encourages us to read the poems in Stay Human as a daily ritual: poems to read before a meeting or after a loss, a poem to prepare for a moment without screens or a kitchen at dusk, and poems for jubilation. Stay Human celebration of Black America with homage to the women who have blazed the way: Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni, Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
Praise for Mahogany Browne
"Mahogany Browne is one of the wisest and most courageous writers of this generation.Stay Human is more than a gift to readers. It is a kind of balm, a kind of cure, kind of love, a kind of preparation for the days ahead and how to survive them. Like a griot, her words remind us that when all seems bleak, we must return to the page because it is there that we will find brightness. The poems in this collection shimmer with an ancestral beauty, proving that the title is not just a suggestion, but a command because Browne knows that the one way through the wilderness is to not become like the wild, but to stay human. A necessary endeavor."
—Robert Jones, Jr., author of National Book Award Finalist The Prophets: A Novel
“So often our minds are clouded with the mania of moments long gone or not quite yet here. To focus our attention, Mahogany L. Browne’s new collection is a hand innerly-stretched on a long walk with the mind. These poems encourage us to enter our hearts with grace and presence. Browne’s ever evolving pen urgently invites us to the prayer of the page so that we may never lose sight of our humanity in the face of trying despair.”
—Aja Monet, grammy-nominated poet and author of Florida Water
"Stay Human is more than a collection of poems. It is a prayerbook. An incantation and manual. A flame held out like a friend. A “night light / left on” to "come back to yourself / whole.” This work is right on time for all of us. And it is a complete and utter gift."
— Adam Falkner, PhD
“Mahogany Browne is an unrelenting dervish who refuses to let any aspect of the creative realm go unexplored and unconquered.She’s a literary and cultural activist and a children’s book author with a voice that calms, encourages and empowers. She pens YA novels focusing on experiences that mirror the lives of colored girls searching for the light of their own voices. And she’s a revelatory poet, consistently finding new ways to celebrate Black lives. She could definitely teach Princeton a thing or two. Nothing like Mo ever was.”
—Patricia Smith, award-winning poet and Professor of Creative Writing
“Mahogany L. Browne entwines the carceral economy, planetary shifts, border abuses, the pandemic and more through a diversity of syntax and visual cues. Browne reflects on and responds to a deeply conflicted time in which all that’s consistent is inconsistency, underscoring how much we need poems like these, and poets like her.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“Mahogany L. Browne is the geometer and keeper of our sacred realities; she raises even the heirlooms of the dead; every molecule of a path home. A leap into revolution. Telling our whole lives. Here on paper are the mannerisms of a hurricane; like looking at a poem and seeing that your big sister is God.”
—Tongo Eisen-Martin
“Raging and bountiful and humming with irresistible music… A prolific cross-genre writer.”
–Buzzfeed