Black Cotton

Diverse and inherently political as the people of the African diaspora of whom it celebrates, Black Cotton is a masterful showcase from a queer, black poet whose cross-continental writing and performances have been described as ‘a visceral and sonic world of teeth and tornadoes’. Kindred to Sea Sharp’s prize-winning debut, The Swagger of Dorothy Gale & Other Filthy Ways to Strut (2017), which is deeply rooted in the poet’s native Kansas, Black Cotton swoops over the untamed Atlantic to take a deeper, broader and more focused look at the woolly ways in which intolerance is manifested and flourishes. In detangling intergenerational trauma, Black Cotton softens the damage caused by internalised oppression and exposes the shame of normative whiteness. As the opening poem suggests, this voluminous collection is so much more than just a ‘reasonable apology for lookin' like that’. Rather, in its styled linguistic verve, it takes the reader by the short and curlies, with an unflinching and uncompromising effort to illuminate and critique how we mistreat each other and ourselves. Dangerously vulnerable like wisps of afro-textured hair, the poems of Black Cotton, shed their delicate strands of truth for any diligent reader who combs these unruly pages.