rosamelia_sanchez's reviews
60 reviews

We Want Our Bodies Back: Poems by jessica Care moore

challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

We Want Our Bodies Back by Jessica Care Moore is a powerful piece of art that gives life and voice to untold stories and unheard people.

We Want Our Bodies Back is a collection of poems that dive into topics like racism, sexuality, patriarchy, harassment, gentrification, and more. One of my main takeaways from these poems is that Moore does not shy away from telling the ugly truth.

These poems have accompanied me for the past two months, and it has been an emotional rollercoaster. Moore touches on the experience of being black in America, but also, being a black woman and black girl in America. The sexualization of black women, and women in general, is beautifully depicted in the lines that Moore delivers to us, such as:

“If we in fact do 'choose’ to ‘give up our bodies,' when

do we get to have our bodies back?

The door to womanhood

can be only entered by a man?

Where is the exit?"

And as a black girl, as a Dominican girl, as a girl who has been sexualized since before she understood what her body and sexuality meant, you will understand. I understood.

Reading this book felt like a reflection of some of my life experiences. It was refreshing to read about the topics that many poets seem to want to write about, but their desire to make their poems an aesthetically-pleasing read holds them back from saying the bad and the ugly truth. Jessica Care Moore does not hold back.

I will most likely re-read many of these poems until I know them by heart because I need to take my time with them, and I hope you do too.

Some of my favorite poems are:

Introduction (YES)

Mother Earth Prayer

We Want Our Bodies Back

Because if i don’t write

After Heaven is All Goodbyes

I Can’t Breathe

Where Are the People

Monk Moore

Gratitude Is a Recipe for Survival

Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick