The Body Losing Its Borders - by Zakia Henderson-Brown (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Body Losing Its Borders is a debut collection shaped by the convergence of profound personal loss and a world rapidly shifting around it. Written across the politically volatile years surrounding the poet's brother's cancer diagnosis, these poems trace the disorientation and transformation that follow grief's arrival.

Against this stands a country in fracture--women's bodily autonomy is increasingly under threat, and Black communities are organizing in response to escalating state violence. These poems inhabit that simultaneity, navigating histories both inherited and self-forged as the poet works to untangle the gnarled roots of race, love, violence, and family.

Told through a Black feminist lens, the collection explores the ways we learn to survive what attempts to undo us, and how we come into our own power in the process. With a voice that is clear-eyed, assured, and deeply attentive, The Body Losing Its Borders charts the ongoing work of becoming: not despite the world's pressures, but through them.

Review Quotes

"Amongst the many things Henderson-Brown has to be proud of here, of all there is to consider, I cannot shake how in these poems she has made grief feel just as much ballet, as it is battle. This is both gunpowder and plié--blood, regardless--and I am changed for having experienced it."
--Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down

"zakia henderson-brown writes with an undeniable swagger. These poems are thick with grief & yet-- & still-- sultry & musical. How many poets can write at the intersection of the past and the future while making it sing in a way that makes the present electric? There is only one zakia henderson-brown."
--José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold

"The Body Losing Its Borders is a masterclass in precision and form, with poems that call upon the roots of us; yes, ancestral, but also the feral roots, the free, that in us that is at liberty and at large. In this debut, henderson-brown weaves elegy, power, a singular wit, and history in language that sears with exactness and surprise. This collection is a rare force and will leave the reader changed."
--Rio Cortez, author of Golden Ax

"'The Body Losing Its Borders, ' the title poem, opens with the word 'before, ' and we are invited into a liminal space. In the hands of zakia henderson-brown, the space is tricky. We go along with the poem's speaker, at once regarding, say, a baby beginning to form words and, a few lines later, in the depths of historic despair. Fury. Grief. Outrage, say, for the murder of Emmett Till. Then we are connected to the speaker's Father. And isn't that how the back-and-forth of time happens? The back-and-forth of the mind? zakia henderson-brown gives us poems that promise plain song and complicated grace. Just what we need in these times of tenacious hope."
--Kimiko Hahn, Author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems

About the Author

zakia henderson-brown is the author of The Body Losing Its Borders, winner of the Alice James Award Editor's Choice, forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2027, and the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. She is also a NYFA/NYSCA Poetry Fellow, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and has received additional support from the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation, Callaloo Journal, the Fine Arts Work Center, and Poets House. Her works appear in New Daughters of Africa (Amistad: 2019), Adroit, Beloit Poetry Journal, Epiphany, North American Review, Obsidian, The Offing, and elsewhere. She has organized with Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, conducted research for UNITE HERE! and the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, and co-founded No Disrespect, a Brooklyn-based anti-street harassment collective. She is a senior editor at nonprofit publisher The New Press, and her list includes Pulitzer Prize finalist In a Day's Work, NPR Best Book of the Year Inventing Latinos, and Prison by Any Other Name, which Publishers Weekly called a "must-read". She lives in her native Brooklyn with her family.