Shaina Phenix’s To Be Named Something Else, winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, has been reviewed by Autumn Newman in the Colorado Review.
“Harlem is in Phenix’s poems the way Bronzeville is in Brooks’ poems. Lineage is found in all these poems through place—of girl to woman, of mother to daughter, of grandmother to God…all within the 45 blocks of Harlem. The poems are that specific and that profound. To Be Named Something Else reaches to the past and calls to the present. … Among the many contemporary formalists I have read—Patricia Smith, Marilyn Hacker, Annie Finch, Jenna Lê, Chad Abushanab, and Alexis Sears, to name a few—this is form like I have never experienced. Winning first place of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize hardly seems enough. This book changes the game.”
To Be Named Something Else is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage—both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems aren’t—we’re dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin’ those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin’ the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . . To Be Named Something Else is a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. It’s tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply.” Phenix’s full-throated poetry, with its “superlative combination of formalism and funk,” is assuredly something else.
Shaina Phenix is a writer and educator from Harlem. The 2021–22 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at University of Wisconsin–Madison, she is assistant professor of English at Elon University.