• Galley campaign, with galleys available for sales force by request, major media, poetry media, Black-led media, visual arts media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
• Major media outreach, positioning this as an exciting 2022 poetry release from a rising star, for readers of Natalie Diaz, Nikky Finney, and Michael Kleber-Diggs
• Bookseller campaign to seed sales and solicit blurbs, with a focus on New York, Tennessee, Ohio, BIPOC-owned bookstores, as well as stores with strong visual arts focus
• Collaborations with PGW to seed book in art museum shops
• Cover reveal and preorder social media campaign in collaboration with Greenlight Bookstore in New York
• Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts
• Advertising in Academy of American Poets and Poets & Writers
• Major virtual launches in collaboration with arts organizations in New York and Los Angeles

Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work

Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.

Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of women: be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of power: “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”

“The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.”

Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.