From Chicago’s 2020 Youth Poet Laureate, Waning is an imaginative yet grounded coming-of-age exploration.
As the moon cycles through phases of reflection, release, and recovery, the speaker in Nué’s collection moves through their own transformative journey. Waning commits to interior questions of Blackness, witness, desire, forgiveness, and what it means to take up space in ways that are healing and liberatory. With wisdom and vulnerability, these lyrical poems interrogate labor in all its iterations: community, survival, and most importantly, who we show up whole for each of our evolving selves.