Black History Month by Dorina Pena

Black History Month lifts the lid on a simmering stew of urgent questions about being brown, about being black. Dorina Pena uses a wide variety of form and technique to keep the topic just under control. Her sharp, subtle, startling poems never do less than justice to their troubled and troubling subject.

–Mark Roper, Author of A Gather of Shadow

Dorina Pena’s poems move deep into the question: what (if anything) is beyond identity, beyond its perpetual marking and perpetual invisibility. These astonishingly concise poems resound in so many registers. In the poem, “Black ballerinas,” Pena writes, “they say the white boys cannot lift us.” And we hear the political urgency of the line, the power of a single moment to ring out as essential commentary on race and identity in the United States.

–Stacey Waite, Author of the lake has no saint

Dorina Pena’s take on racism and race relations in Black History Month is deeply haunting, sadly real, but liberating, a metaphor of our time, where we still live in a world that measures us not by what we are, but by the color of our skin, the color of our eyes, or our inability to pass as white. But these are not negative poems at all. Boldly brilliant, her words question our stereotypes of what it means to be us, the deep scars we carry, or that the world around us pushes upon us because we are black, too brown, not too black or not white enough. There is fire and defiance in Dorina Pena’s vivid images, her amazing use of language that so urgently speaks to our time, to our common struggle as us, our struggle to be and remain us, whether we are too brown or black, white, or not white enough, against a world of hate that we must defy together as these poems so urgently do. Dorina Pena’s poems could not have come at a more urgent time.

–Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Author of When the Wanderers Come Home