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 wonder-struck 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