by Christie Cruise (Author)
Awarded the 2024 Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Christie Cruise’s poetry chapbook, Thick Black Lines, discusses themes of grief and loss, policing Black bodies, and gentrification and colonization. Divided into three sections named for the book’s title, Thick Black Lines quickly grabs the reader’s attention with poems like Depression Be Like and While You Were Judging Me for Being Fat in the first section, Thick, which explores “heavy” topics such as mental health and sexual abuse. Black grapples with topics related to contemporary social justice issues that specifically impact Black people with poems like When Karens Cry and Attacking Critical Race Theory Won’t Make Me Forget. Lines focuses on poems that reflect the effects of colonization and gentrification with poems like Bodies That Know Boxes and Suffer Little Children, which uses ekphrasis to describe Marion Palfi’s black and white photo, Detroit, Paradise Valley. Thick Black Lines masterfully blends contemporary social concerns with historical context and poetry to create a chapbook that challenges readers to think critically about our most pressing societal issues.
