The After of Arrival

On first books, ancestral discipline, and the hunger for softness

“She arrived whole. I’m still learning how to be.”

My first book, Working the Roots, is here. And I’m learning how to hold myself in the light, too.

Softness is my inheritance. I’m learning to claim it out loud.

Today is the day. Working the Roots is making her way into the world for the first time as a published collection. And of course she’s a Cancer—tender, intuitive, moon-held. An accidental mirror to my own Cancer moon. As she floats comfortably in her own sea, I watch her unabashed expression of feeling from the shore, still learning how to inhabit that kind of ecstatic ease.

I am happy she is free. But her liberation has stirred up in me so many unexpected feelings. As a first book, like a firstborn, she is making me reflect on the life I’ve lived so far and how I’d like to live it going forward. I am now living in the after of her arrival.

In the last hours before she came, I had a vivid dream: I was in my late grandmother Gladys’ kitchen in Atlanta with my mother and another Black woman academic I’ve felt quiet tension toward for years. But in the dream I was relaxed, bent halfway over the oak table that consumes much of the kitchen’s space. The academic and I commiserated over grad school, asking each other how we kept our grades up despite the oppressive culture of anti-Blackness that pushes out so many brilliant scholars before they even truly begin. As we spoke, the cornbread rose in the oven, baked in one of my grandmother’s ancient and enduring Pyrex dishes. I explained to the academic that my grandmother had died, but I stay in her house every time I return home to Atlanta. Eventually, we acknowledged our thirst and grabbed some canned drinks from the fridge. My initial move was to grab a seltzer as usual, but something in me reached for a diet ginger ale, the same kind my grandmother always drank to manage her blood sugar.

My grandmother’s backyard in Atlanta. Her quiet offerings made this blooming possible.

I woke feeling both unsettled and comforted by the dream. The academic represented everything I thought I had to be in order to succeed in academia—light-skinned, thin, married to a man who is dependable but doesn’t ask women any questions, and completely disconnected from my own emotions and desires. The diet ginger ale represented something similar within my own bloodline. My grandmother was a brilliant, resilient woman—a Black single mother from rural Georgia who fought to purchase her own home and leave an inheritance for her children and grandchildren. She survived through discipline, thrift, and structure. In so many ways, she deprived herself of true sweetness in order to extend her life and the lives of the people around her. And I am grateful for her sacrifice—her legacy of hard work and laser focus has gotten me through some incredibly difficult and painful situations. But now that I am a literary mother of Working the Roots, this tender collection of poems I wrote as I was finding my truth in my twenties, I am craving softness and sweetness for my legacy. The ancestors did everything they could to get us here alive. But now we are going to have to use an entirely new set of tools to truly live in the present.

Part of that practice of living is also defined by how I want to be in community going forward. I’ve lived in Baltimore for nearly two years at this point, but making Black friends has been a chronically disappointing endeavor. Baltimore is a city in turmoil, with Black residents often living in decaying, unkempt environments while white residents live in segregated idyllic neighborhoods where they choose to be blissfully ignorant of the destruction and chaos that exist mere feet from their artificial enclave (this is something that has been formally studied by scholars such as Dr. Lawrence Brown, who juxtapose the geography of the “Black Butterfly” against the “White L”). The result of this segregation is that Black folks are often living in survival mode, so focused on trying to make ends meet that there is no time for the “luxury” of friendship. Additionally, the economic scarcity of the city creates a kind of social scarcity in the artistic community, in which there is a trend toward Black artists tokenizing themselves and gatekeeping access into otherwise all-white arts spaces. My experience in Baltimore has taught me that no matter how deeply I am impacted by the economic and social realities of racism, I have to turn toward authentic connection so the problem doesn’t get worse. When we are overly focused on “grinding” solo, we are ultimately more vulnerable to the forces of discrimination than if we had pooled our resources as a collective.

The emotional authenticity and sincerity found in Working the Roots can sometimes feel too tender, too idealistic to survive in such a harsh world. I can feel protective of her, even wanting to keep her from being published to avoid the scrutiny of people who have turned off those parts of themselves. But she is me, and I won’t deny her in the same ways I have been denied, rejected, or accused of being too much, too sensitive, too vulnerable. Accepting her means accepting myself. And in that there is the hope of wholeness.

As I reflect on these layered truths—my grandmother’s sacrifices, my desire for sweetness, the ache of building community while protecting tenderness—I’m reminded that survival brought us this far, but softness will carry us the rest of the way.

I want to share a poem from Working the Roots that speaks to this moment: a spiritual reawakening, a shedding of old skins, and the deep ancestral call to rest, love, and begin again.

This piece came to me like a wave—one of the first times I knew what it felt like to be held by my own words.

rest is the part in the waterfall

through the part in the waterfall i saw my own face   for the first time    reflected back to me in the space between the water and the world i wished for   after quitting my life three weeks ago   and coming inside the warm wetness of the jungle in these blue mountains   the tangle of memories that share my name are coming undone in my hands    like shoelaces    like braids    like a fish’s rainbow skin    when i hold these scales in my hands i know that i was always worth the weight    i stayed away from this place so long because i was afraid of being alone   but to my surprise everybody came too    everybody i am followed in the space of my footprints   in this land of rest i learned that we leave footprints for those who share our faces on the inside   i want to learn my inside faces   they come out against the rush of water like i did the first time i was born   i am my mother’s inside face   i know that now   i know that now   i know that now    away from everybody except my inside faces i baptize myself again and again and again and again in these cool quick waters until a portal opens up like a cervix effacing and i step through with my big grown body like a baby and wail as loud as my first cry   there is no shame in being born   who says it only has to happen once   i’ll be born as many times as i need to   not to get it right   but to feel the force of remembering lives that were not mine    flowing through me as easily as i once coursed through my mother’s veins   when i am at rest i am a nursemaid for the dead   giving self-sweet milk to spirits with fast-drying throats   my breasts contain as much food as i let them   i give to you only as much as I give to myself   where there is hunger there is distance   where there is scarcity there is fear   i will not fear this closeness of love   taste my breasts and know abundance   milk was my first waterfall   my first mirror   my first feeling of love   my mother rested enough to give me life    i will rest enough to give you life   and you    and you   and you   and you   and me

And because this book was shaped by sound, by driving and dancing and crying and conjuring—I made you a playlist.

A sonic mirror for the emotional arc of the book.

These are songs for laying burdens down, for choosing softness after rupture, for sitting in grief, returning to the body, and practicing self-devotion. It starts with Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady” and winds through ache, rebirth, play, critique, and communion.

Listen here:

Working the Roots is officially out in the world today.

She’s tender. She’s layered. She carries my blood, my longing, and my hope for the future.

If her words speak to something in you—if you’ve ever craved softness in a hard world—I hope you’ll consider preordering, sharing, or simply sitting with these pages.

👉 Order through Charis Books & More (Black queer feminist indie bookstore)
👉 Or directly through my publisher, Querencia Press (woman-owned indie press)
💌 If these words find you, I hope they remind you that softness is sacred. I’d love to hear what rises in you as you read.

With care,
Amanda