Woke

What does it mean to be woke when waking up costs everything?

In this fierce, tender collection, Shayla Brown asks - and answers - that question with lyric honesty: she catalogs the bruises of history, the small violences of family and church, and the quiet rebellions that learn to survive, speak, and sing anyway.

Part testimony, part sermon, part incantation, these poems move from the front-porch confessions of "12 Years Bleeding" and the sharp spiritual interrogations of "John 10: Stay Woke" to intimate reflections on hair, motherhood, and the cost of being visible in a world built to erase you. Brown's voice is plainspoken and prophetic - she holds grief and anger in the same hand she uses to stitch reparations into everyday life. Here are elegies for stolen children, psalms for the exhausted, and manifestos for the unapologetic self.

Read this book if you want poems that are both balm and wake-up call: poems that name the wound, demand justice, teach tenderness, and insist that waking up is an act of survival and of revolution.

Inside you'll find:

• Witness poems on erasure, systemic violence, and the ongoing work of remembering.
• Spiritual lyricism that borrows from scripture, hymn, and sermon.
• Personal essays-in-verse about hair, reproduction, family legacy, and the long labor of being believed.
• Sharp cultural critique and tender memoir moments that pair to form a whole portrait of what it means to be Black and awake.

Praise:

"A collection that wakes you slowly and then refuses to let you sleep. Shayla Brown's poems are fierce, faithful, and necessary."