Refuse to Disappear

Poetry. In her third collection, Tara Betts speaks to all the silences that have been urged upon us, and especially upon Black women, by speaking boldly and without hesitation of truths lived and witnessed. Subjects range from the local diner to Simon Biles, from the story-rich past to the future we shape together.

Says Cornelius Eady, "In Refuse to Disappear, Tara Betts holds fire-sometimes, her poems are like beacons on a darkening day, sometimes her poems radiate the blaze of black women's voices, then and now, never to be forgotten, sometimes her lines flame up and unjust history is singed, and you read, like you've found that friend who puts language to that thing you felt but couldn't put words to, that home fire rescue. What a revelation."

Aracelus Girmay applauds: "In Refuse to Disappear Tara Betts writes histories and lineages into lines, pleating language into reunion, tucking it into the page's pocket for another to find across time-gris-gris, amulet, 'my slingshot and my stone.' These poems shimmer with Betts's fierce, devoted attention to Black Life. Like poems by Audre Lorde and June Jordan, these poems refuse silence and forgetting. With love and clarity and fight, they face fire and speak: 'time may burn and i / refuse to disappear.'"