We Look Better Alive
Ali Black
APRIL 28, 2025
$16 (shipping included)
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Ali Black is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of We Look Better Alive (Burnside Review Press, 2025) and If It Heals at All (Jacar Press, 2020), which was selected by Jaki Shelton Green for the New Voices Series and named a finalist for the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, jubilat, Literary Hub, Muzzle Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Balance Point Studios, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making, teaching, and sharing art.
“‘Back then, I didn’t know words / could keep Black women alive.’ Alive talking to the dead across the threshold of death. Alive under lights and music. Alive with words in her mouth and hand. Ali Black writes right into deep zones of feeling. Havoc, sorrow, isolation, togetherness, desire—often all at once. Line after line an assertion of breath carrying its range of memories, details, and astonishments, like: ‘She look so good alive / the bush behind her...’ Black’s words blessing the living with all that daring, honest looking. And blessing the dead, keeping them alive by the utter force of her attention.”
—Aracelis Girmay
“What really fascinates me about Ali Black’s We Look Better Alive is how it complicates our understanding of dying. There are literal deaths scattered throughout the book: funerals for a mother, for a father-in-law, reports of a grandmother’s passing, a friend’s. And yet this collection seems most concerned about the metaphorical deaths Black women experience in their quest for beauty and acceptance. From doctor’s offices, to school classrooms, and even to the social media pages of female celebrities, Black leads us through a museum of death, demonstrates how society robs Black women of life at every turn.”
—Taylor Byas