Lilith, but Dark

LILITH, BUT DARK reveals a series of confessions and penances, exploring a southern black woman’s tour through lover’s lament. It explores intimacies from home to the schoolyard to the bedroom. It is a journey through tornado alley, a search for power and peace in the eye of a southern storm.

With poise and precision, Nichole Perkins lays bare a black woman’s life… There is so much beautiful writing to be found in these pages. -Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women

These poems are a communion, and I am so delighted with the new animals and constellations Nichole has given us. -Tommy Pico, author of IRL

I’m spellbound by this collection from Nichole Perkins. The voice is lush and all Nashville, teeming with lightning bugs and lip gloss, tornadoes, family bonds that bind and break us, childhood crushes and cruelties, curvy bodies, and desirous bodies that destroy and are destroyed by lovers… Lilith, but Dark glows in the night. -Tiana Clark, author of Equilibrium

Perkins floats us deep into this southern basin and its deposits of family violence, boys and babies lost too young, skin scarred by eros or its lack. But these are not studies in brokenness. Rather they are poems rich with the complications and conundrums and power of one modern blk womanhood, agile- and able-voiced. -Kyle Dargan, Cave Canem Prize winner & author of Anagnorisis: Poems

Perkins deftly navigates the risks that come with lowering one’s protections, of seeing and be seen, with grace and generosity. In the world of the collection-a Southern space, a vulnerable place-her speaker rises, a woman marked by desire, by envy, by family, by love. -Donika Kelly, author of Bestiary