by-Ashley Mack-Jackson
Winner of the Academy of American Poets 2025 James Laughlin Award, Diamond Forde’s second collection, The Book of Alice, continues the project of ancestral excavation, restoration, and creation that she started with her debut collection, Mother Body. Where Forde’s debut, which won the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize judged by Patricia Smith, began the investigative work of deconstructing and reconstructing body and history to create pathways for contemporary being, The Book of Alice extends both gracefully and painstakingly into the work of God-building. From the delicate and tattered remnants of history inherited from grandmother to granddaughter, Forde weaves together work that acts at once as liturgy, incantation, and testimony and begs the reader: Can I get a witness?
As a daughter of the Black church and the Great Migration, what immediately strikes me about The Book of Alice is the audacity of the undertaking. Inspired by her inheritance of a family Bible from her grandmother Alice, Forde draws from and conjures her own religious iconography using the framework of The King James Bible and her grandmother’s life. With its gold etched cover and red type print to announce Alice’s words, as if they were the words of Jesus, The Book of Alice looks like the kind of Bible I saw on my own grandmother’s coffee table. Because of this, the collection’s boldness feels wholly blasphemous and righteous. Because, what does it mean to steal from and to diminish a power that was once used to subjugate you? With The Book of Alice, Forde takes a seat at the sacred desk and allows the reader the opportunity to see the creation of the divine without subterfuge. The agenda is clear. Alice is the divine teacher, the lamb slain for the sins of the world.
Look at the poem “Womaning,” which is written completely in the red words of Alice. The poem is full of the daily tasks that make up Alice’s life, but it quickly turns from meditation to lamentation:
Love, GOD say, is obedience, so I obey
the alarm of sun sung throughout my window,
climb down cold steps to hymn & hem, ta cook,
clatter, & kid myself into believing these tasks
don’t hook familiar shackles…
Here, Alice is both teaching about and talking back to her conditions. This message is made more salient because “Womaning” is immediately preceded by the poem “Sethe Speaks to Hagar,” a poem that is free of Alice’s red-lettered voice, but leans heavily on the same plaintive nature through the lens of the collective Black woman’s mythology. Forde invokes Toni Morrison’s Sethe, a mother whose love was so “thick” that she’d rather kill her children than to have them delivered into the hands of enslavers, to reach out to the biblical Hagar, the woman who is repeatedly delivered into the hands of her oppressors by God himself. But, while these poems could feel relentless in their repeated handling of injustices great and small and far too quiet, and which are looped into the lives of Black women, they are always etched with the resistance that repurposes curse to prayer and prayer to blessing.
Throughout the collection, Forde steps into the complex nature of Black womanhood in the context of the American experiment. What does it mean to be the central figure in American life, the hands that raised a nation, but to be nearly completely absent from its creation story? But, while Forde grapples with this question, she does not answer it for us. She allows this question, this challenge to reverberate. Forde calls The Book of Alice “a project of resurrection,” and it is just that. History relies on the linear narrative: an unmessy, uncomplicated system of erasure. But, this is why Forde is a poet: she is a conjuror who speaks life back into dry bones, reanimating her foremothers with flesh and breath, creating an unbroken circle that can not be denied.
Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021), a Kate Tufts Discovery award nominee, and The Book of Alice (Scribner Books, 2026), winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award.
She has received a doctorate in Creative Writing at Florida State University, with a specialization in both African American poetics and fat studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Forde has received recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, nomination as a Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist, and has earned a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the Interviews Editor for Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at North Carolina University, and as an avid lover of colorful dresses.
Diamond is available for readings, workshops, panels, and more.
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Ashley Mack-Jackson is a native Hoosier. She received a B.A. in English Creative Writing from IUPUI and a M.A. in English Creative Writing from Ball State University. My main joys in life are teaching, reading, and writing. I teach in the College of Education at Butler University, and my poetry has appeared in literary journals like Reverie, Drumvoices Revue, and Callaloo.