Praise for A STONE’S THROW FROM C R A Y
“In these challenging times, I’m grateful for these lessons of love and hope. Each poem is an altar, an offering, a prayer tracing my steps back to the hanging wisteria. These poems sing, sizzle, dance, and knock you over without a word of apology, then without warning, they reach out an arm to grab you. Enter this bright garden of words at your own risk…Wise! Stunning! Essential!”
– CHERYL BOYCE-TAYLOR, author of The Limitless Heart
“These are powerful and jagged poems, offering no false consolation as it tracks and survives the wreckage of racism and all that is meant by coming apart. Nearly every poem is in memory of someone lost or whose persistence remains unmarked. There is always another in the space of the poem, a form of connection in the midst of a loss now centuries old, but also precisely now. Michelle Alexander’s language takes risks but that is only because life itself has been risked, repeatedly, and also now. No ‘I’ stays at one with oneself under such conditions but there is company among those who have come apart, whose lives can be addressed and renamed. This writing is beautiful and saves no one from the difficulty of its truth.”
– JUDITH BUTLER
“No easy epiphanies, no evasions, in Michelle Alexander’s A Stone’s Throw from C r a y. Summoning what Derek Walcott has described as ‘epic memory,’ Alexander transforms ‘a past-present that is penal / and aching’ into innovative lyric, visual, and sonic poems that re-envision, with hope, our distressing historical moment. ‘We’ve begun / a first song that sings of us,’ she writes, ‘an Orpheus blackening.’ This book exemplifies what poetry does best—staring fiercely into the unspeakable in order to speak a new, redemptive world into existence.”
– TONY TRIGILIO, author of The Punishment Book
“To labor toward light, one must believe that it exists. Each poem in Alexander’s debut is a body working toward light, which reveals, burns, illumines, leads, and destroys, but none can thrive without it. Enter here with courage, this stone’s throw from cray. And understand, as Alexander writes, that liberation hangs on attempts.”
– CM BURROUGHS, author of Master Suffering and The Vital System
MICHELLE ALEXANDER is an American-Trinidadian poet, creative nonfiction writer, and interdisciplinary practitioner. She graduated from New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, receiving the Herbert Rubin Prize in Poetry, and holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, where she was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. She has served as a Poet in Residence for the Chicago Poetry Center and as a Visiting Teaching Artist for the Poetry Foundation’s “Forms and Features” series.
She is the recipient of the Furious Flower 2024 Poetry Prize and a co-founder + Director of Interdisciplinary Arts at Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine. Her poetry collection, A Stone’s Throw from C r a y, the New American Prize winner (2024), was a finalist for The National Poetry Series, The Word Works Competition: Washington Prize, The 42 Miles Prize, and The Lightscatter Prize. Michelle is also the winner of Breakwater Review’s 2025 Peseroff Poetry Prize.
