“And what if someone were to offer you her girlhood and her motherhood, her hidden knives and her soft places, her earliest afro-puertorican memories and her current pandemic-scape strategies? What then? In black god mother this body Raina León offers what a god mother should offer, a portal to infinite divine possibility, a safe space to learn something new, a multi-faceted generosity. These are poems that mother, mentor and mend and break open again. Leon offers us everything and so we have to decide. What will we do with it?”

– Alexis Pauline Gumbs (co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals)

“Mothering has never been easy. And learning to mother oneself back to wholeness and healing while also trying to mother one's own children even harder. In Raina León's collection, however, we are able to see motherhood, and in particular Black motherhood, in all its fullness and complexity, with all its joys and fears in all its tenderness and trauma wrapped in the language of poetry and prayer only a true priestess like León could conjure. black god mother this body is a soft and sharp meditation on Black motherhood, colorism, identity, ancestry, and what it means to heal and nurture our inner child. In this striking collection of lyrical prose poems, fragments of memories, and colorful collages, León explores what it means to mother our past and present selves, our children, our memories, and our ancestors even in the face of unspeakable trauma, violence, and uncertainty. When she thinks she can't find the language to express or make sense of these mother wounds, León keeps cleaving and pruning away at her own past until she can get to the root of what it means to mother well, always wondering: is memory the dance of mourning and love that survives long enough to bloom?”

– Jasminne Mendez, author of City without Altar

black god mother this body is rich experience with the expansiveness of the overlapping identities contained in a singular Black woman. The language is a conjuring. The conjure is a poem. A poem is life. Life is breath, pumping heart, sinew and gristle animated by spirit. Life is given by the mother. Raina León gave this book life. The poems and snippets of memoir have teeth. The collages have eyes. The subject matter has bones and muscle. All together - a beautiful soul rises into becoming a most cherished friend. This book is a journey, a healing, a hint at the ability to render trauma poetic. It resists the stagnation of antiquated foolishness about identity. It revels in its own Self so deliciously, you're compelled to join.

– Christina Springer, Author of The Splooge Factory

Dr. León's work is a vast and vibrant, multivocal and interactive journey exploring the spiritual and ancestral magic in our bodies. In black god mother body we enter a world where the enduring interconnectedness of being, the "gone and not gone," is our strength, but not without the realities of fear. This book asks questions and meditates with us as we consider the frailty and power of mothering, and of being a child.

– Natalie Graham, Author of Begin with a Failed Body

“A masterful ode to lineage and futures. A deeply personal unearthing of both the whispered and the unspoken for so many of us existing as woman, Black, immigrant, mother, feminist.”

– Sherisa de Groot, founder Raising Mothers

“With black god mother this body, Raina León offers us poetics that feel like collective memoir, for all of us in the lineage of "people murdered slow." The slivers and snippets of memory and confession range a lifetime of being daughter and granddaughter, niece, mother, wife, scholar. This collection is a delicious, intimate and transgressive exploration of complex identity; having read it, I feel fresh and whole.”

– adrienne maree brown, Author of Emergent Strategy

​​”Enter this book and watch a woman bloom – with love, with fire, with the grit of life. Raina J. León offers a glimpse into the space of a Black woman’s body where old cultures collide with new ideas and the god in her rises from within. Power comes when a woman, turned mother, feels a threat looming over her children with the realization that “this country will kill you if you’re not looking and even if you are.” This collection is as striking visually as it is crafted with original artwork amplifying the soul of the text. With language and music set to the rhythm of the heart, León’s black god mother this body is a deeply intimate and powerful celebration of the body and its blessings.”

– Amanda Johnston, Writer, Artist, and Founder of Torch Literary Arts

“Léon transcends time and space by taking us through a journey of the intergenerational: her ancestral roots, childhood, pregnancies, and motherhood. This collection intertwines the language of the spiritual, emotional and physical while tackling issues of colorism, racism, patriarchy, wellness, and healing. black mother god this body is a calling of reflection and embodiment immersed in life and death during a time of cosmic and earthly shifts.”

– Dara D. Mendez, PhD, MPH, maternal and reproductive health professor, epidemiologist and advocate

“In his introduction to El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (1997), Martín Espada wrote, “The common expectation is that literature born amid social and economic crisis by nature must be didactic and polemical, obsessed with simplistic affirmations of identity and written in a raw idiom unconcerned with nuance,” but that a look at Latino/a poetries “will frustrate that expectation.” In their recent introduction to Beyond the Field: New Latin@ Literature (2013), editors John Chávez and Carmen Giménez Smith explain the new landscape: “Over the last ten years, U.S. Latin@ writers have produced poetry and prose whose influence is yet to be seen, but whose cultural work is exceptional in its scope, variation, and vision” and that “the term ‘Latin@ writing’ is as complex as each member’s varied life experience suggests.” …

— Can any label or identity explain our freedom, our community or history? How do you identify and what does it mean? In this special episode with Jasminne Mendez, Darrel Alejandro Holnes and Raina J. León explores the fluidity of terms and identity as Black Latinx,o,e,a people from the diaspora. Work featured by Toni Morrison, Aracelis Girmay, Alan Pelaez Lopez and Elizabeth Acevedo. Episode produced by Cin Pimentel. Transcription by Victor Jackson.

All around, he's there

An owl questions with a human face

Phoebe

Elective

Persephone returns

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