Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude, finalist for a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry. She is also the author of Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Codjoe’s poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Her honors include a 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.

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Bluest NudePoemsFrom"A Family Woven like Night Through Trees"
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
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Bluest NudePoemsFrom"Marigolds of Fire"
He had an antelope’s face—I could
go on like this. I liked how he led me, almost
a shove, how he kissed me—mercy—how I
kissed him back: my back against the foyer
wall. Sometimes we called to each other
like birds. It wasn’t ritual—how can I
explain—he laced his fingers, made his knees
a ladder. I braced myself on his backward horns.
I climbed him then, into the tree.
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Bluest NudePoemsFrom"After the__________, I yearned to be reckless. To smash"
We were so desperate then, the two of us, undone
by longing, drawing night from the cracks
inside us, drawing the night out, as long as we could,
until dawn broke like a beat egg and our heartbeats
quieted in private fatigue. I’d be lying if I said I don’t recall
his name. The end of the world has ended, and desire is still
all I crave. Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable.
Over half of me is water, a river spilling into restless limbs,
the rest of me is a scalding heat like the asphalt under my feet.
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“Bluest Nude insists on the personal. Codjoe’s ‘I’ is vibrant and alive, clear in its existence as an individuated lens. Wonderfully, this foregrounding of the first-person does not prohibit a sense of a collective, but rather enforces it.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Bluest Nude is a heady mix of ekphrastic and archival poems . . . . Codjoe conjures the unmistakable textures of Black Americana." —Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation
"Sensual, sound-driven, and brimming with a necessary truth, the poems in Bluest Nude are pulsating with both grief and beauty. Wrought out of resurrection and reclaiming, these brilliant poems honor the mystery and legacy of the body. Codjoe has written a true triumph of a debut that feels urgent and deeply human." —Ada Limon
"How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze. In appetite and loss, rage and praise, what animates these poems is a profound cherishing, an abiding (and yet at every turn surprising) love rushing out from the lush wilderness of Ama Codjoe's rapturous imagination." —Tracy K. Smith [on Bluest Nude]
Selected Works

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Intimate and formal, sinewy and disciplined, Ama Codjoe’s language is a celebration of sensuality without indulgence. Motifs wink from the stanzas like faces hidden in woodgrain. Codjoe invites you to emotional revelations, but the generosity of her work allows readers to make their discoveries their own. Her poems bring folkloric eros and lyric precision to Black women’s experience.