Super Sad Black Girl

Super Sad Black Girl, a poignant debut collection by Chicago poet Diamond Sharp, explores anxiety, depression, and death, through sparse lyrics that feel heavy with solemnity and uncertainty. Several poems are snippets of standalone conversations, including one between a speaker and the acclaimed playwright Lorraine Hansberry:

Where can we go to be Black, Ms. Hansberry?
The Other Side? Mars?
I’ve been thinking about leaving.
Is the only place for Black girls between
the purgatory room and the edge of this universe?

As if in answer, the visually breathtaking “Tired” is composed of one dire question repeated over the entire page: “What if I am tired of myself?” That poem is immediately followed by a suite of “Purgatory Room” poems, in which a speaker makes small talk with Rekia Boyd and Sandra Bland, Black women from Chicago who were killed as a result of police violence:

Rekia say she don’t remember
the last time she’s shot the shit like this.
Everything is fuzzy
and her ears still ring from the buckshot.

“Touch,” another visually striking poem, consists of staggered quatrains that repeat the line: “It’s up to the living to keep in touch with the dead,” a refrain that comes back in the closing line of a poem that begins:

My room is unkempt.
Suicide would be unkind—
a bother. An inconvenience.

Sharp’s careful structuring and meticulous repetitions come together to form a profoundly unsettling book, one that nevertheless gestures toward acceptance of factors beyond one’s control (“My illness is an heirloom.”), and also of the self, as exemplified by the simple syllabic progression of the poem, “I Can Be Sad in Public.”