If My Flowers Bloom

DeShara Suggs-Joe, 2024

If My Flowers Bloom is about desire. Is there room to bloom or does the harvest only come in the afterlife? Is it okay to be Black and queer and woman in this world?

Overflowing with love and aching for more space, DeShara Suggs-Joe questions the powers that be while longing for space carved out for her flourishing.

Praise for DeShara Suggs-Joe

In these vibrant and fluent poems, DeShara Suggs-Joe makes stunning and most tender portraits, charts a most vivid coming of age. If My Flowers Bloom is a triumph, a gathering, a reunion, a lighthouse, a song.

— Safia Elhillo, author of Bright Red Fruit

Vulnerable, unpredictable, and necessary, the poetry of DeShara Suggs-Joe embodies the art of risk. The muddy waters these skillful verses are willing to traverse on their quest for a kind of radical self-honesty is exactly what the world needs right now. This is a poet on the rise, a poet to watch.

— Samantha Thornhill, author of The Animated Universe