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A powerful and innovative debut collection—the first in the new Polaris Poetry Series—that captures the rhythms of Black girlhood as it navigates the spaces between city and southern roots.
Through poems rooted in hoodoo spirituality and the author’s Gullah Geechee heritage, Shakeema Smalls’s Sweetwater Mass uncovers ways of knowing that transcend physical and temporal barriers, boldly addressing the lived realities of racism, classism, and economic struggle while simultaneously journeying toward joy and transcendence. Drawing on her identity as a Black, queer woman and her family lineage, the “red birds / of the ancestral arcana,” Smalls writes from a place of resistance—against capitalism and systems of oppression—and in search of higher spiritual truths. Smalls’s work finds lineage in the voices of Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Joy KMT, and Nikky Finney, while offering something wholly unique that broadens conversations about systemic violence, poverty, and the complexities of Black girlhood. As she grapples with the intersections of gender, race, class, and resilience, Smalls weaves breath, brevity, and stream of consciousness into poems that hold space for both grief and growth.
The Polaris Poetry Series is edited by Cynthia Manick and features collections of Afrofuturistic and Afrofuturism-adjacent poetry. The series is a dedicated home for this innovative poetic style and for amplifying the voices of Black poets. Sweetwater Mass is the first in the series.
Shakeema Smalls is a poet and developmental editor from Georgetown, South Carolina. Her work has been widely published in outlets such as Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Emergent Literary, Tidal Basin Review, Root Work Journal, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fruit Journal, and Foglifter, among others. She is an alum of the Tin House Workshop, the Obsidian Foundation, and VONA. She was a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and served as the inaugural Markus D. Manley Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Lab in 2024. She was recently named a 2025 SouthArts South Carolina Literary Fellow. Sweetwater Mass is her debut poetry collection and the first book in the Polaris Poetry Series.
