Encompassing the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s astounding career, The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring.

With deep empathy, thoughtfulness, charisma, and lyricism, Boyce-Taylor’s work explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes. Grief is both an anchor and a door throughout Boyce-Taylor’s poetry, as seen in Mama Phife Represents, a hybrid of memoir and verse on the death of her son, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Questions regarding Blackness and Black womanhood in the United States are stitched throughout her books, and Boyce-Taylor leans into a more overtly defiant political register in her latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, while maintaining the connective spine of the Trinidadian dialect that appears throughout all her work. Selections from these books, as well as her other poetry collections, appear in this new volume.

Curated from Boyce-Taylor’s body of work, The Limitless Heart encapsulates her progression as a writer throughout the decades of her highly successful career.

BIO

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet and teaching artist. She earned an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and an MSW from Fordham University. Her collections of poetry include Raw Air (2000), Night When Moon Follows (2000), Convincing the Body (2005), and Arrival (2017), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Mama Phife Represents (2021) was awarded the 2022 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry by The Publishing Triangle.

The founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series, Boyce-Taylor is also a poetry judge for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. She has led workshops for Cave Canem, Poets & Writers, and the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center. Her poetry has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater and the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company.

Boyce-Taylor is the recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers For Writers Award and a VONA fellow. Her life papers and portfolio are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

REVIEWS

“Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is among the giants of Caribbean women’s poetry. This beautiful book is the exquisite distillation of over forty years of work. In the Limitless Heart, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is at the height of her poetic powers.” -- Jacqueline Johnson, author of A Woman’s Season

“At the heart of this new work she meditates deeply on what being a Black woman in America looks like, what growing older and seeing her mother’s face in the mirror feels like and how to navigate survival in uncertain times. We are so lucky to have these poems and this poet in the world; overflowing with so much living.” -- Yesenia Montilla, author of Muse Found in a Colonized Body

“This is what poetry should be: a capture of real life, a song for what can be, the unabashed truth. Her work is a rock on which future poets can build.” -- Nancy Mercado, PhD, American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement

[P]  Haymarket Books  /  October 17, 2023

0.4" H x 8.9" L x 5.9" W (0.55 lbs) 168 pages