Lovely and Suffering is a searing collection of poetry from Stacy Dyson chronicling a year in the life of a Black woman navigating a pandemic, political upheaval, and unrelenting racial injustice. Spanning the deeply personal to the fiercely political, Dyson’s poems bear witness to grief, rage, resilience, and love. Written from March 2020 to March 2021, this book documents what it means to survive and speak when the world wants your silence. The poems are raw, unflinching, and achingly honest. Dyson blends lyricism and spoken-word fire in a narrative that is part journal, part manifesto, and all heart.

Reading this book knocked the wind out of me more than once. Dyson doesn’t just write poems, she lays down testimony. Her voice is unapologetically fierce, drenched in lived experience and spiritual grit. Whether she’s honoring Breonna Taylor or calling out white liberal performativity in “Karen, Your Mammy Done Left the Building,” Dyson never flinches. The writing is blunt, rhythmic, and stinging. Her mix of intimate grief and public fury creates a powerful dissonance. She doesn’t aim to make readers comfortable. She demands they feel what she feels, and she earns that demand.

What stuck with me most was the deep tenderness under the rage. Dyson’s tributes to community, family, and sisterhood are gorgeous. In “Je T’aime” and “Quieted Soul,” she reveals how healing hides in the laughter of a child or the memory of ancestors who “never run/ not unless it is toward the enemy…” These moments were breathtaking. But there’s a loneliness too, a poet aching for a better world, and exhausted by the work of building it. Sometimes, the poems felt like confessions. Sometimes, they roared like war drums.

I’d recommend Lovely and Suffering to anyone who wants to understand the emotional toll of being Black in America, especially Black women. It’s for people who want their art honest, loud, and bruising. She speaks with heat and clarity. And if you’re willing to listen, you’ll come out changed.

Pages: 146 | ISBN : 1955683018