Leila Mottley’s new poetry collection woke up no light is out on April 16, 2024. The poems tell a linear coming-of-age story with visceral imagery and tenderness. Clear motifs constellate the collection, which is so rhythmic and unexpectedly somatic. Poems, like “a case for / against reparations” and “what a Black girl wants,” I felt in my body: so many of Leila Mottley’s poems are physical, not cerebral, experiences.
Structure & Form
The collection is like a mosaic. The poems are fragments of memories, dreams, family history, and the future all carefully arranged to create a picture of growing up.
The collection opens with two epigraphs and a poem about reparations that serves as a prologue. Leila Mottley divides the poems into four sections: girlhood, neighborhood, falsehood, and womanhood. Girlhood is the weightiest with 13 poems. The other sections have 11 poems.
Stylistically, I noticed two categories of poems right away: those with capitalization and those without. The ones without capitalization felt intimate and whispered, like Leila Mottley was telling them just to me, privately. The ones with capitalization felt like I was meant to hear them in a public space or that I could talk about them afterwards, not keep them like a secret.
Preorder woke up no light on The Stacks Podcast’s Bookshop.org Team Preorder Shop to support my fave bookish podcast!
Annotating Tip: Slashes and Italics
Leila Mottley sparingly employs slashes and italics to great effect. I carefully annotated all the lines with these details and found it rewarding to look back through the collection at just these standout lines.
My Collection Favorites
- On Starting Over
- how to love a woman sailing the sky
- waterfalling
- what to do when you see a Black woman cry
- Elijah McClain’s Last Words
The Title
When I finished the book, the title felt really meaningful on several levels. It appears in the poem “Summer of 2020,” but its meaning extends throughout the collection. There is a lot imagery about nighttime or obscured light (gloom, eclipses, stars etc,). Additionally, the poems touch on the kind of anxious, beautiful, spiritual, and private things that haunt your thoughts in the middle of the night. I imagined myself, awake in bed, no light around me thinking the things in these poems too.
Cover Admiration
The stunning cover of Leila Mottley’s debut novel Nightcrawling and the cover of this poetry collection almost look like a set. They’re both vibrant. They both feature illustrations of a Black girl, and the vector of movement—like the girls are mid whirl—is so similar.
This post is dedicated to fellow Bookstagrammer Tiana (@teeturnedthepage) whose perfectly curated Nightcrawling playlist I listened to while writing this post.
Thank you Net Galley and Knopf and for making this collection available as Read Now. I accepted this e-arc gladly in exchange for an honest review.
Annotate With Sara 