About Nikia Chaney
Nikia Chaney is the author of us mouth and two chapbooks, Sis Fuss and ladies, please. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). Her poetry has been published in the Iowa Review, Pearl, Sugarhouse Review, and Vinyl, and her memoir ladybug was published by Inlandia in 2022.
Praise for to stir &
As the title suggests, to stir & dazzles with motion, fragment, and image. Chaney invites us into a realm of spinning hums and of echoes singing through and to each other. We move through the book like dancers, at once suspended in our relationship to another, at once caught in the sway of the familiar the “hurt and soothe” of bluesy poetry moans. The book vibrates with the electric, resonant power of song and memory.
—Natalie Graham, author of Begin with a Failed Body: Poems (The Cave Canem Poetry Prize Series)
In to stir & we are welcomed into a literary and visual experience where truth, brownness, and skin are the voices we hear. These poems don’t tiptoe into the hard subjects with “rosie a thing / my dirt skin can never be because it don’t need to be,” and realizations like “you keep asking men to / say you are enough.” This is balanced with a love of sound, the texture of feathered myths, the realities of what is, and the possibilities of what can come next. In these poems, the speaker brings us to the light and we come out changed yet whole on the other side.
—Cynthia Manick, author of Blue Hallelujahs
Chaney’s poetic vision is urgent and daring. In to stir &, she can make words do anything she wants them to. They come to life like Mexican jumping beans, can talk the pain of a breakup, the indifference of law or capitalism to human need, the fluctuations of love, romantic and familial. In “the blast off” the poet imagines taking off for an alternate, hopefully better universe: “Watching through space windows/the seat of/this country’s/open purse/trauma finally receding.” In Chaney’s democracy of words, lines rush ahead in dizzying rhythms that reveal the jagged edge of all our concerns.
—Elaine Terranova, author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir
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