Florida Water: Poems
Inspired by the cleansing water often used in spiritual baths, Florida Water is an ode to the myriad ways a poem can rinse, reflect, reveal, and unravel us.
An honest meditation on migrating to South Florida for love, connection, and community, these poems lay bare the challenging dance between the role of the artist, lover, and organizer. aja monet confronts the interpersonal truths of community organizing while also uncovering the state's fraught history with racial prejudice, maroon communities, and natural disasters. This intimate collection of lyrical poems are the artifacts of her search for belonging and healing as she wades through the rising tides of climate change, heartbreak, and systemic violence.
aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 2007 and aja monet follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. Her first full collection of poems is titled My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, from Haymarket Books. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, and spirituality. In 2018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 2019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. aja monet co-founded a political home for artists and organizers called Smoke Signals Studio. She facilitates "Voices: Poetry for the People," a workshop and collective in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders. aja Monet also serves as the new Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls.
"Thank you, Aja Monet."
--Ava Duvernay
"Interesting, powerful, at times challenging poetry."
--Roxane Gay
"A triumphant collection."
--O Magazine
"Stunning and evocative... fierce and revolutionary."
--Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"A bold, intimate and powerful collection of poems."
--Ms. Magazine
"Aja Monet's writing blazes in these breathtakingly fierce poems."
--LitHub
"Aja Monet's poetry, like her activism, is one of resistance and reimagining. It resists simplicity, instead opening up new vistas for the reader and new points of entry into perspectives that are largely ignored; she gives voices to the marginalized and forgotten and imagines worlds in which those voices can ring out."
--The Los Angeles Review
