Encompassing the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s astounding career, The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring.
With deep empathy, thoughtfulness, charisma, and lyricism, Boyce-Taylor’s work explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes. Grief is both an anchor and a door throughout Boyce-Taylor’s poetry, as seen in Mama Phife Represents, a hybrid of memoir and verse on the death of her son, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Questions regarding Blackness and Black womanhood in the United States are stitched throughout her books, and Boyce-Taylor leans into a more overtly defiant political register in her latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, while maintaining the connective spine of the Trinidadian dialect that appears throughout all her work. Selections from these books, as well as her other poetry collections, appear in this new volume.
Curated from Boyce-Taylor’s body of work, The Limitless Heart encapsulates her progression as a writer throughout the decades of her highly successful career.
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“Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is among the giants of Caribbean women’s poetry. This beautiful book is the exquisite distillation of over forty years of work. In the Limitless Heart, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is at the height of her poetic powers.”
—Jacqueline Johnson, author of A Woman’s Season
“At the heart of this new work she meditates deeply on what being a Black woman in America looks like, what growing older and seeing her mother’s face in the mirror feels like and how to navigate survival in uncertain times. We are so lucky to have these poems and this poet in the world; overflowing with so much living.”
—Yesenia Montilla, author of Muse Found in a Colonized Body
“This is what poetry should be: a capture of real life, a song for what can be, the unabashed truth. Her work is a rock on which future poets can build.”
—Nancy Mercado, PhD, American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement
“This spectacularly collected poetry of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a revolutionary and delectable West Indian and American pelau dish of inventive and colossal wordplay meshed with history, culture, grief, and the quest for eternal love in all forms.”
—Kevin Powell, author of The Kevin Powell Reader: Essential Writings and Conversations
I clearly expect The Limitless Heart to situate Boyce-Taylor in the pantheon of talented poets of the 20th and 21st Century.
—Randall Horton, author of #289-128: Poems, winner of the 2021 American Book Award
Other books by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Other books of interest
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Citizen Illegal
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Smoking Lovely
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The Body Family
by Hope Wabuke -
All the Blood Involved in Love
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So We Can Know
Edited by Aracelis Girmay