Carried within Martheaus Perkins' The Grace of Black Mothers are the many howls of lost children and their martyrized mothers. This debut collection brings a lyrical reckoning on behalf of dismembered dreams by boldly finding grace through our Black mothers, aunties, and grannies. The work invites the reader into a yard where "whisper-thin soul-jazz drips over America" to flip through a Nile-long family album. Mamie Till-Mobley, Sybrina Fulton, Harriet Tubman, and the author's own mothers guide us as we "wander streets like cartographers of poverty" and hold our "promises to come home." Perkins shows his craft by shapeshifting through fighting game menus, optometry charts, screenplays, pirate codes, social media threads, and forms that embody dreams themselves. The Grace of Black Mothers is a collection drenched in complexity and nuance: homemade heroes and villains, justice and fabrication, wit and risk, resurrection and erasure. In Martheaus Perkins's The Grace of Black Mothers , we find a bold new voice heralding the fraught ways we enter the world. Here, there are poems for grandmothers, martyrs, and the missing, those taken and those barely saved. Brimming with found forms and ingenious genres-wild scripts, letters, erasures and modern-age technologies-this book resurrects the dead and forgives the living. In its elegies and reclamations, homage and hunger, the lies are as wondrous as the truth, all huddled up under each other, like every child under the keen eye of his mother. Chocked full of Hollywood heroes and hometown misfits, some parts sad, some parts funny, some parts outlandish, The Grace of Black Mothers "paint[s] tender black songs between the stars." Inventive and brazen, these poems will make anyone sit up and take notice. -Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up and Room Swept Home The work is boldly humble and compassionate, such excellent work in such diversity of form, navigating and reinventing a revelatory and haunting complexity of black masculinities, one where, "Our face is allowed to be pretty." -J. Michael Martinez, author of Heredities , Museum of the Americas , and Tarta Americana Martheaus Perkins' The Grace of Black Mothers brims with grace, nuance, and artistry, drawing a complex and bountiful Black world in the face of anti-Blackness and drawing upon the knowledge, wit, and wondrousness of Black mothers, ancestors, a boundless Black world. Perkins' formal play and aesthetic daring, social critique and political engagement, and assured skill and fearlessness at going where these poems must go herald an important new talent! -John Keene, author of Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021) and Counternarratives: Stories & Novellas (New Directions, 2015/Fitzcarraldo, 2016) Martheaus Perkins was born to a single mother in Center, Texas. After a childhood in and out of homes in Houston, he graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University as a first-generation student. He is the recipient of the Robert Creeley Memorial Award judged by John Keene, the President's Award by Voices, the GMU Rinehart Fiction Award, and the Robert Raymond Scholarship. He co-edits BRAWL Lit and teaches literature at George Mason University. Currently, he lives in the DMV with fellow writers of the "International House of Poets." The name "Martheaus" is a collection of each woman who helped raise him: "Mar-" for his grandmother's nickname, "-Thea-" for his mother's name, and "-us" for his big aunties.