Longlisted for the 2026 PEN America Literary Awards

Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural – flowers, speech – to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: “-- i am learning to lift -- my voice -- like a flower -- in -- a field of flowers --” The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.

BIO

Aracelis Girmay is the author of four books of poems: GREEN OF ALL HEADS (BOA Editions, 2025); the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award; and Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing.

For her work, Girmay was nominated for a Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018. For the last several years, Girmay was on the faculty of Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and before that taught community writing workshops with young people in New York and California. She has received grants, training, and fellowships in support of her work from the NEA, the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Community~Word Project, among other programs. From 2021-2025, Girmay served as the editor of BOA Editions' Blessing the Boats Selections and is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund.

She is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books).

REVIEWS

“Through this masterfully written poetry collection, centered on the materiality of memory and remembrance, we connect with that which exists at the other side of perception.  Aracelis Girmay creates territories of simultaneity and convergence, while pondering death as a communal experience. At last, we have a collection of poetry that talks about death in our intimate language of affections.” -- Mayra Santos-Febres, author of La otra Julia and Boat People

“Alongside the poet we pace the rhythms of grief as well as the everyday to approach the revelation that while death never rhymes with life, it provides us the extended bassline riff supporting our livity —those bright, bold notes echoing the sound we were and are and will be running out of this life…is benediction, is prayer, is eulogy, is chant; is mourning ground, is grief, genealogies of; is life, is is & am, is altar, is GREEN OF ALL HEADS, filmy netsela of blessings gently landing on our heads to embrace, to hold our fragile mortality, ever luminous in the ordinary.” -- m. nourbeSe philip, author of She Tries Her Tongue – Her Silence Softly Breaks and Zong!

[P]  BOA Editions  /  September 16, 2025

0.55" H x 8.82" L x 5.83" W (0.35 lbs) 124 pages