Long Eye

In Long Eye, Kwoya Fagin Maples brings us a sea-bound collection that channels the mythic, defiant voice of a Black Mermaid.

Inspired by Mami Wata, a water spirit of Gullah Geechee folklore, Maples explores the power and divinity of being a Black woman, a mother, a thinker, a protector, and creator. The poems emerge from a neurodivergent mind navigating writing, parenthood, and the Atlantic waters of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The sea and its many creatures serve as guides—for survival, resistance, and transformation.

As she explores the intersection of science, poetry, and mythology, Maples also seeks to depict Black familial bonds in societies structured against them. Woven through the book is the voice of the mermaid, reminding us that “every underwater being exists in relation.”

At turns wonderstruck and irreverent, these poems pulse with human longing. Maples is a poet whose work is both musical and meticulous. Her eye somehow equally trained on the world at large and her own inner workings. The result is an astonishing, immersive experience.

Praise for Long Eye

“In the Hayden-esque piece 'Invisible Work,' Maples remembers the 'teachers…whose gestures I recall better than names,' a grandmother hobbled by age who covers her in the night with the quilt of a great-grandmother, the father who lacquers her rock collection. Elsewhere, a husband is up with the babies, or a mother is adorning each braid with seven beads and relishing the work of combing three heads—even a blue whale can depend on the postpartum attentions of a Black mermaid, and the damselfish, ever territorial, threaten fisticuffs in distress. Throughout this collection, Maples is preoccupied with endearing depictions of nurture and protection that “infect us with hope” even when she acknowledges the ways in which family can cause pain and disappointment. And because Maples’s viewfinder is never long averted from the symbiosis of the clownfish and anemone, the banner over Long Eye is love." —Cedric Tillman, author of In My Feelings

“Steeped in the sea and stitched with mythic allusions, Long Eye renders a gaze that looks both backward and forward, as well as into the Atlantic’s depths. These embodied and bioluminescent poems by Kwoya Fagin Maples shine with a blue whale’s hoarding heart, daughters as ‘sun-lit girls,’ and the self with a mermaid’s ‘muscled fin’ and a hairline grove that can be flooded with oil. In empowered verses that read as reclamations, and as a Black woman, daughter, mother, sister, and partner, the poet writes, ‘At last, I am larger and darker than life / and take up the space I ought to.’ Attentive to ancestors, siblings, children, and a beloved, and punctuated by pieces entitled ‘Autobiography of a Black Mermaid,’ this collection of praise songs and elegies is awash with bodies of water, and a current of gorgeous, oceanic vocabulary. I loved sinking into the ‘orca-scatter’ and ‘kelp forest’ of this book.” —Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Singing from the Deep End

“‘There is mercy in water, relief // for evil on land,’ observes the Black Mermaid whose oracular vision guides Kwoya Fagin Maples's stunning second collection Long Eye. Indeed, as these poems move from wave to shore, they are rich with blue whales, oysters, dolphins, parrotfish, and all the creatures of the roaring Atlantic. What I admire most about these poems is their keen gaze at both human horror and natural beauty, bound together by the tender intimacies of family and love.” —Nancy Reddy, author of Pocket Universe

Praise for Mend

“Maples’s skill as a poet pours through every page of this book. This is difficult material, but she illuminates it with carefully shaped lines and flowing prose poems. Her voice is vivid, urgent. Every line is powerful.” —New York Journal of Books 

“Maples’s masterful image-making magnetizes and mesmerizes [...]. Art hurts and it heals. Kwoya Fagin Maples is a visionary doctor. History is humbled in her hands.” —Abraham Smith, author of Destruction of Man

“Mend is a brutal story, lyrically told in the voices of three of those women, and its author has memorably created both a painful reminder and a beautiful tribute.” —Kim Addonizio, from the runner up citation for The Donald Hall Prize

“With Mend, Kwoya Fagin Maples is equal parts teacher and poet: releasing a part of history that needed to be told, she's brought dignity and light to the women of Mt. Meigs; further, she's urging readers to learn and listen, to not repeat the ugliness hidden in our white-washed past. This is a must-read book for anyone, timeless and worth any praise Maples may yet garner for it.” —Alabama Writers’ Forum

“Maples does not flinch to enunciate the disgusting truths of racism and misogyny; neither does she neglect the possibility of beauty. These poems carry an unbearable weight of witness: so much suffering, but also the joy of survival, the survival of joy.” —Joel Brouwer, University of Alabama

“Maples’s poems are narrative-driven, yet clear-voiced and lyrical; she writes us a world, a history, with her vision and leans back into a past to write herself into the story.” —DéLana R. A. Dameron, author of Weary Kingdom: Poems