Justin Rogers
ISBN: 978-1-949099-05-8
31 pages
"What happens when you give your mind over to magic? Are you forever changed? Do your powers eventually go away? If so, what are you left with? Simultaneously triumphant and sobering, Black, Matilda, is a collection of love letters, warnings, scriptures, bops, and testimonies that elicit just as many questions as it does instructions. How do we deal with the enormity of being black and survive? 'Words / become prayers when / you clap / for each / syllable'. Justin Rogers puts the wand in your hand with expert rhythmic and structural choices. His poems make you a believer in the notion of transcendence; the belief that one can lift the words off a page and save the lines for your worst days, when blackness is the attacked body and the thick air you gotta wade through."
— Kirwyn Sutherland
"'Black Matilda invisible / till the author Black / then black becomes / magic.’ Justin Rogers has written a collection that pulls close into the survival taking place in the American peripheral. Black, Matilda lives beyond the bounds of that existence, using magical realism to scale the interior of a particularly black sadness. Written in colors as anthemic as they are brick, these poems read as Roald Dahl illustrations in which Crunchem Hall becomes Hogwarts and anxiety can assume the shape of everything we fear. What I arrived at is that when black folks make art, we make ourselves exist and even in our imaginings, we are hungry and dreaming."
— Kush Thompson
Glass Poetry Press
Precision · Vision · Inclusion
Black, Matilda
Cover by Kush Thompson
$8.50
Sample poem from Black, Matilda:
Black Matilda Learns to Drive/to Shoot
The arm is a wand.
See how the whole world moves
with one swing?
Feel the velocity when you
squeeze the grip? The shock of each loaded
gear laying your body on the ground?
What is more powerful than stepping
on the neck & watching a world
whistle around in the pit of your knuckle?
You hear them sirens? See them flashing lights,
make sure they not in your rear view.
Remember,
they learned these tricks before you.
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Justin Rogers is a Black poet, educator, coach, and editor from Detroit, MI. Rogers shares poems surrounding living and praying as a Black man in America. He most recently has work published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gramma Press, and is author of micro-zine Nostalgia as Black Matilda (Rinky Dink Press 2017). He is the coordinator of InsideOut’s after school program, Citywide Poets.
