A Tinderbox in Three Acts

This book was selected by Whiting Award winner Aracelis Girmay, who serves as Editor-at-Large for BOA's Blessing the Boats Selections series.

Blessing the Boats Selections is named after Lucille Clifton's National Book Award-winning collection, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems (BOA, 2000), in honor and celebration of her enduring legacy. Lucille Clifton's writings of Black life and Black female life have shaped a sense of what is possible for so many. In the poem that begins "won't you celebrate with me," she writes: "born in babylon / both nonwhite and woman / what did i see to be except myself?" Blessing the Boats Selections titles walk behind and grow out of the poetry of those lines. Submissions are thus open to all women poets of color in the U.S., including poets who identify as cis, trans, and non-binary people who are comfortable in a space that centers on women's experiences, regardless of citizenship and publication history. Our hope is that the Blessing the Boats Selections will further facilitate encounters between readers and writers of some of the most extraordinary texts of our time.

In the author's own words: ? My intention with this manuscript is to contribute, as an Indonesian American poet and mother, to the act of collective remembering that I believe my and future generations of Indonesians deserve, wherever we are. It is possible that this work's publication may affect my ability to visit my homeland safely in the future, but to find language in the face of terror is exactly why I wrote it.?