
Diamond Sharp's Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free?
Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the "Other Side," as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police.
Sharp's poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp's lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.
Diamond Sharp is a writer from Chicago and an alumna of Wellesley College. She is an editor at Bandcamp and a former editor at Rookie. Her work has been featured on Chicago Public Radio and Poetry Foundation, as well as in New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, PANK, and elsewhere.
"I've never read a collection of writing--poetry or otherwise--that spoke so clearly to what it feels like to live with a bipolar brain. Diamond Sharp has done what has often felt like the impossible: she has translated what so many of us have experienced into something so jaw droppingly familiar and achingly beautiful that you can't escape the truth of it. More than just merely "feeling seen," this collection made me feel heard and held and understood. Sharp is a master of her craft and this book is a testimony and a song."
--Bassey Ikpi, author of I'm Telling the Truth but I'm Lying