2022 Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry

CITY WITHOUT ALTAR

Poetry | Cover Art by Elia Alba | Noemi Press - Akrylica Series | Adult

“Not since Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf have I been so deeply stirred by a poet’s ability to give vivid voices of those who have been silenced and forgotten. - Julia Alvarez

City Without Altar is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. The titular play in verse that sits at the center of the book seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Between the scenes of the play are “interludes” that explore a different kind of “cutting” and what it means to feel othered because of illness, disability and blackness. Ultimately, City Without Altar is a meditation on being/feeling “blacked out” by the archive, on the world stage and in one’s daily life.