In their latest collection of poems, Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Brionne Janae dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival.
“I’ve decided I can’t trust anyone who uses darkness as a metaphor for what they fear,” poet Brionne Janae writes in this stunning new collection, in which the speaker navigates past and present traumas and interrogates familial and artistic lineages, queer relationships, positions of power, and community.
Because You Were Mine is an intimate look at love, loneliness, and what it costs to survive abuse at the hands of those meant to be “protectors.” In raw, confessional, image-heavy poems, Janae explores the aftershocks of the dangerous entanglement of love and possession in parent-child relationships. Through this difficult but necessary examination, the collection speaks on behalf of children who were left or harmed as a result of the failures of their parents, their states, and their gods.
Survivors, queer folks, and readers of poetry will find recognition and solace in these hard-wrought poems—poems that honor survivorship, queer love, parent wounds, trauma, and the complexities of familial blood.
Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize
Checkout the title poem here: “Blessed are the Peacemakers”
"Drawing the monster of inheritance as it shapeshifts, these poems illustrate how our fathers’ sins can make fugitives of us. When an insistence on ‘holding up the bloodstained banner’ has led to autophobia, what then to make of our mother’s tear‑stained face in the mirror, her ‘breathing like a gazelle run down?’ Saved in moments by something as simple as the sight of the lemons growing in their grandmother’s yard, abandoned in others to ‘don’t touch me’ seeping through the wall, the speaker in this elegiac collection finds in the fact of flesh the hope of praise.” —Lyrae Van Clief‑Stefanon, author of Open Interval
“If ‘we are nothing more than heirloom seeds / falling into the dirt and blooming,’ then Blessed Are the Peacemakers forces us to consider which birds of hell and paradise fly from the soil of family and nation. The speakers of Janae’s magnificent garden merge memories and insights with the death, deception, and desire we often lack the courage to face. The wonder of this arresting collection is how in reckoning with legacies of violence, estrangement, and love we ‘learn, just a little, about peace.’” —Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude
Cover Art By: Ify Chiejina
“Blessed” is the word that comes to mind after reading Brionne Janae’s After Jubilee, a collection of finely-tuned narratives presenting characters in a precarious balance between love and hate. Many voices collude to answer for both the jubilation and horror that has plagued black people from the beginning, including the black man with the white father, the parents donating their infant son’s organs to save other lives, and those ignored and forgotten in the massacre at Slocum, Texas in 1910. I find myself locating in these poems the “vital things” that make loss bearable. Janae offers one profoundly important truth: this history is as much in front of us as it is behind us; fortunately for our survival, we have not slipped past redemption. This is an excellent read, if for no other reason than the range and lyricism of Janae’s voice.
--Amber Flora Thomas
Poems from After Jubilee
Interview's on After Jubilee
On Grief and Inheritance an Interview with Olivia Kate Cerrone