dayliGht: Poems

by Roya Marsh

Overview

Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry

dayliGht is a dazzling collection of poems from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race.

Growing up, Roya Marsh was considered “tomboy passing." With an affinity for baggy clothes, cornrows, and bandanas, she came of age in an era when the wide spectrum of gender and sexuality was rarely acknowledged or discussed. She knew she was “different,” her family knew she was “different,” but anything outside of the heteronorm was either disregarded or disparaged.

In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374538897
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,109,366
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Roya Marsh, a native of the Bronx, New York, is a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator, and activist. She is the Poet in Residence at Urban Word NYC, and she works feverishly toward LGBTQIA justice and dismantling white supremacy. Marsh’s work has been featured on NBC, BET, Button Poetry, Write About Now Poetry, Def Jam’s All Def Digital, and Lexus Verses and Flow, and in Poetry magazine, Flypaper Magazine, Frontier Poetry, The Village Voice, Nylon, HuffPost, and The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic (2018).

Table of Contents

A Note from the Author: On Black Butch Representation in Daylight xiii

In broad dayliGht black girls look ghost 4

In broad dayliGht black descendants look gall 6

In broad dayliGht bruised black girls look goals 8

In broad dayliGht black girls look gat 11

In broad dayliGht black activists look gunshot 14

In broad dayliGht black girls look gat II 15

In broad dayliGht black moms look grieving 19

In broad dayliGht black aunties with no man look damn good 21

In broad dayliGht black saviors look grandma 23

In broad dayliGht black daughters look gossip 25

In broad dayliGht suicidal black girls look guilty 27

In broad dayliGht black girls look grave 29

In broad dayliGht battered black women look grazed 30

In broad dayliGht black girls look grim 32

In broad dayliGht black dykes look ground 34

In broad dayliGht kinky black girls look g-spot 36

In broad dayliGht black daughters look greedy 37

In broad dayliGht black girls look gleeful 38

In broad dayliGht black dykes look good enough to fuck 39

In broad dayliGht black dykes look glow 43

In broad dayliGht black catcalled dykes look grumpy 44

In broad dayliGht black women look grouchy 46

In broad dayliGht black bipolar girls look grimy 48

In broad dayliGht black victims looked gagged 50

Homage to dyke girls with gap-tooth smiles 56

In broad dayliGht black mfa candidates look glamorous 58

In broad dayliGht black dykes look go 60

In broad dayliGht black sisters look glass 62

In broad dayliGht black dykes look gomorrah 65

In broad dayliGht black queer femmes look gala 68

In broad dayliGht black stars look like gyrochronology 69

In broad dayliGht black dykes look grilled 72

In broad dayliGht black abuse victims look gone 75

In broad dayliGht black thrivers look growth 80

In broad dayliGht black moms look swollen gland 81

In broad dayliGht black lovers look guest 84

What are the conditions of your freedom? 88

Acknowledgments 91

Editorial Reviews

"[dayliGht] brings to life the complexities of coming of age in a heteronormative, white supremacist, gender-policing society. It is potent and sharp, abundant and grand. This one will grab you, and it will stay in your body long after you’re done reading."
—SARAH NEILSON, Literary Hub

“dayliGht has a singular, potent, and persistent swagger—like if KRS-One had written Stone Butch Blues. In this tear-jerkingly matter-of-fact collection, Roya Marsh doesn’t propose an escape of past traumas but rather, sits in the cut, ponders, and comes back with her lyrical gun cocked, ready to even some shit up. This butch is so done with your bullshit, and this is her book of receipts. dayliGht is a breakthrough masterpiece. I can’t stop crying, and I won’t stop crying. Get. Into. It.”
—BRONTEZ PURNELL, 2018 Whiting Award winner and author of Since I Laid My Burden Down

“Saturated with wit, wonder, and heartbreak, dayliGht is an intimate collection that is relentless in its examination of the intersections of womanhood, queerness, and Blackness. A brilliant debut book of poems.”
—ELIZABETH ACEVEDO, National Book Award-winning author of The Poet X

“Roya Marsh’s debut is at turns gripping, angry, and joyful—and always powerful. I love these poems for the small wonders I find in each one. In comparing her mother’s cancer to gentrification, for example, she reveals much about both. These poems are crafted out of a love for self and for the selves that might grow when given a chance to heal. dayliGht is a revelation.”
—JOSÉ OLIVAREZ, author of the PEN/Jean Stein Award–nominated poetry collection Citizen Illegal

“Polyphonic and rhythmically dense, Roya Marsh’s poetry is uninhibited as she traverses her interior life and infuses the otherwise mundane settings with peril, delight, and wonder. dayliGht is a read that cannot be swallowed whole but must be taken in measures to appreciate how each poem births another with a difficult yet admirable strength.”
—MORGAN JERKINS, New York Times–bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing

From the Publisher

03/01/2020

Fulfilling that old-fashioned term tomboy as she was growing up, nationally ranked poet/performer Marsh didn't see anyone like her in either the neighborhood or the media. Now, in a straight-at-you debut, she talks about being a butch black woman, revealing a complex, hard-won sense of identity grounded in her physical being. "For what it's worth i ain't never wanted to be no man," she insists, while also confronting this country's long history of racism. Hunting down her ancestry, she encounters a feckless white woman and cuttingly comments, "results say i'm hers/ in history/ in old law," even as painful vignettes of racial oppression give way to the observation, "even black will crack if you beat it enough." VERDICT Throughout, you can hear the pain—and this performer's stage strut, though these poems are as easily and rewardingly read as heard.

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