Named one of New York Public Library’s Best Books, 2023

Winner, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

To Be Named Something Elseis a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineageboth familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenixs debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: enlivens the everydaythe everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems arentwere dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . .To Be Named Something Elseis a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. Its tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply. Phenixs full-throated poetry, with its superlative combination of formalism and funk, is assuredlysomething else.