The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997-2022)

By Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Book Overview

Award-winning writer Cheryl Boyce-Taylor selects highlights from her illustrious career, accompanied by new, unpublished poems.

The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of poetry curated from Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's body of work. Born in Trinidad and raised in Queens, Boyce-Taylor has received recognition as a finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize for her collection Arrival and the 2022 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry by The Publishing Triangle. In this volume of new and selected work, her progression as a writer is on full display--the evolution of her voice, style, obsessions, and interests throughout the decades of her highly successful career.

With deep empathy, thoughtfulness, charisma, and lyricism, her work explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes. Grief is both an anchor and a door throughout Boyce-Taylor's poetry, as seen in one of her most recent books--Mama Phife Represents, a hybrid of memoir and verse on the death of her son, Malik "Phife Dawg" Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Blackness and Black womanhood in the United States is another thread stitched throughout her books, and Boyce-Taylor leans into a more overtly defiant political register in her latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets. Selections from these books, as well as her other poetry collections, appear in this new volume.

A collection that encompasses the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's astounding career, The Limitless Heart captures the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1642599727
• ISBN13: 9781642599725
• Release Date: October 2023
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 5.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.9" x 8.9"