"Ariana Brown’s ‘Sana Sana’ is the perfect poetry collection for 2020. With radical tenderness, Brown invites us into some of her experiences growing up a Black Mexican queer woman, through the conflict and joy and healing. After performing spoken word across the country for more than a decade, 'Sana Sana' is the first printed collection of Brown’s most famous work. A perfect gift for any lover of poetry and everyone just trying to survive capitalism.
'The lesson — / if you are alive, you are descended from a people / who refused to die. Nothing is more sacred than you.'
A Small Press Distribution poetry Bestseller, from rising star indie publisher Game Over Books."
Publisher Game Over Books
Publication Date 2020-01-21
Section Poetry / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Kaleigh O.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781732498686
After ten years of performing her spoken word poetry, Ariana Brown gathers her favorite poems to return to in Sana Sana. With a tender and critical voice, she explores Black girlhood, the possibilities of queerness, finding your people, and trying to survive capitalism. All are explored as acts of different kinds of love—for self, for lovers, for family, for community. Brown’s collection refuses singularity, insisting on the specificity of her own life and studies. As she writes toward her own healing, Brown asks readers to participate in the ceremony by serving as witnesses. Sana Sana, colita de rana, si no sana hoy, sana en la mañana.
"Brown’s collection, Sana Sana, is simultaneously revelatory and familiar; like its title, the poems within aim their gaze towards healing but not healing in a conciliatory way; here Brown looks to heal by swishing a finger through the wound and holding the blood up to the light. Which is to say, Brown's writing is for the ache, for the scab, for the scar, and the ghost pain, 'It takes love to name the damage /on one’s own body.' And this is a collection about naming, about forgiving, about the music of memory and the invention of self and history in order to survive."
—Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award Winner
"The virtue that I have long admired in the poems of Ariana Brown is the warmth that is directed upon the audience. And these poems know and identify their audience with gentleness and gratitude, even—or especially—when the audience is the self. Even death links its fingers with praise, even dislocation is met with a crawl back to some familiar affection. I am thankful to once again be witness to these poems that welcome and make space for the people who most need it. And for how Ariana Brown sets a lens on the world that is critical, but always caring."
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster
Poetry. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies.
