BLACK LIVES MATTER! Released during Black History Month, this collection, featuring three distinct voices in conversation, offers readers an experience of protest, engagement, and sympathy evoked by the Civil War yet set against the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Al Salehi is a Persian-American poet and entrepreneur whose parents immigrated from the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Ivy Schweitzer is a writer and scholar from a Brooklyn Jewish family. Salehi and Schweitzer use Emily Dickinson's incomparable poems written during the mid-nineteenth century as entry points for their own meditations on still-pressing issues of color, fairness, the police and courts, even the 45th president, and how together we can imagine a different, more equitable world. Though a cloud of darkness pervades
Within Flesh
, it also contains glimmers of hope and resilience through humor and satire-showing that poetry can transcend time and borders, sparking healing conversations across cultures and generations.