In woke up no light, LeilaMottley writes about Blackness and womanhood with such attention that we feel the weight as well as the celebration. This book of poems, the author’s first, traces the speaker constructinging who she is in relation to her family, the world she was born to, and the fact of her Black, female body. Author of the award-winning novel, Nightcrawling (Knopf, 2022), and Former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California, Mottley’s writing is imaginative, concise, and unique. I was particularly impressed with the poet’s ability to talk about unfairness without sounding helpless. Her stance—witness? witness/survivor?—but never judging, allows the reader to be involved with the poems and make their own conclusions. We feel for the speaker not because the poet has told us to, but rather, because we have been allowed to experience a life in close detail.
The prelude poem, “a case for/against reparations” sets up one of the main questions of the book. The speaker is neither hopeful, nor entirely despondent. Instead, she is pragmatic. She makes it clear that the dream and what that concept means is determined in many ways by the body into which one is born, “split myself open rib to rib so they can get / a nice look at how i’ve / marbled, cratered, rotted”—the world demanding one offer of proof after another. She knows a debt is owed her, and we watch as she resigns to the fact that it will never be paid.
The poem announces the book as a truly Californian story: “the first thing i learned about the land i spawned from / was pick a poppy and the orange thrash will send you / straight to the hollows of hell (...) can you afford what we are worth / namely Everything”. The setting is the city of Oakland, yet we still are reminded of the droughts and fires of the larger region. We see the hills, downtown, lovely Lake Merritt.
The text moves forward in sections: girlhood, neighborhood, falsehood, womanhood— the speaker, by stages, confronts the violence and glory of living. The shifts in voice reflect the changes in the speaker—ever yearning, of course, but also wiser and stronger with each piece.
In the “girlhood” section, in “what a Black girl wants” the young speaker begs to be known, “if you had bothered to ask / i would have told you / i know how this goes” and already is sensing the inevitable invisibility the world wants for her. But this speaker is not interested in succumbing, “of all the things i could have been / never once did you think / i might not want to be small”.
The speaker already sees her life is different from her brother’s. He will be offered graces she is not. She is not saying he has an easier life, but it is for sure a different one. In “boys will be boys will be animals will be tender will be lost will be–” the speaker assesses how their mother is to him, “i watch my mother / watch her son and think, one day i will / love a boy like this”. The poem tilts towards how hard life will be for him, “boys will be boys until they are a hardened mass” knowing but not yet knowing what he’ll face as a Black man.
Mottley addresses young womanhood so effectively in this section; it is impossible to avoid the fear for the speaker and her future. In “secret gardens and other invisible things” the speakers’ body begins to change before those of her peers, and we feel for the girl in a woman’s body,
and now a body is a thing to be
tamed
taunted
trespassed
This poem is one of the most spot-on portrayals of that time in a girl’s life: confusion mixed with shame mixed with unknowing. As women, we are told to “celebrate” this time, which both then and with hindsight, I’ll say is a ridiculous request. Other poems in this section, for example “internal monologue while being followed home from the bus” and “raising somebody’s future woman” describe the (not irrational) fears women learn as girls. This first section is perhaps my favorite within this stellar book; it is such an honest portrayal of being a daughter and sister, of being invisible, while at the same time being seen for all the wrong reasons.
In the second section, “neighborhood,” the poet dives into the specifics of place. We see an Oakland on fire, Elijah McClains last moments, the neighborhood boys. While the poems are of this place, the scenes are described with such specificity that they transcend location. We see a place that doesn’t want attention in the guise of salvation, but really just wants to be left alone. From “Crow Call”
Didn’t they know we always wanted to be just us?
(...)
This is the only place I do not have to cave
the bermuda triangle of Oakland
where no one dares come
our way. I like my people
untouchable / disappeared
I like my people
alive.
In the “falsehood” section, the speaker comes into her adult self. She sees the world for what it is, but also gains her own agency. In “On Starting Over,” she moves into her new apartment, but does not succumb to magical thinking about her new life. She is cautious, but optimistic,
A new beginning is only as shiny
as the window shattered just
to walk through
You will always find glass in the cracks of
your floorboards, your bloodstream
In “womanhood,” the final section, the speaker looks back with a mature stance, paying tribute to the girl she was, to others who went before, to her own body, and to the place that made her. The poems move towards lyricism and muscularity; it is as if we can sense the portrayal of the stages of life through the voice and poetic moves made by the poet. To be clear, this collection is a heartbreak.
By the book’s end, we see a speaker who has fully come into her power. In “Respect,” the lowercase “i” now replaced by the capital as the speaker takes account, “tell me you are afraid of my gait without ever acknowledging I have walked here.” The final poem, “poem for a reckoning day” conjures a visit to “the Big House,” to “resurrect it from clay soil / wet with flashbacks / and revelations”. The poem feels poured into missing histories; it also serves to honor the women who came before:
our women’s hips have
been split open in to flames
like it will fill all the gaps
in my bloodline
where men made
an ocean of our bodies
This collection is remarkable in the ways it addresses the multiple selves of the speaker. The speaker both surveys her world objectively, while very subjectively reporting on its impacts. We see this play out as the vantage point matures, moving through stages of innocence, fear, knowing, palpable anger, self-realization, again and again. The language is unencumbered, turning muscular. At times, I nearly forgot to breathe.
Linda Michel-Cassidy’s debut story collection, When We Were Hardcore, was released by EastOver Press in February 2025. Michel-Cassidy is a senior editor for book reviews as well as collaborative and cross—disciplinary texts at Tupelo Quarterly, where she also contributes criticism. Michel-Cassidy teaches workshops in experimental prose, flash fiction, and editing, and conducted The Eight Books That Made Me podcast for the Mill Valley, CA Library. She was a contributing editor at Entropy Magazine, where she edited podcast reviews, wrote reviews and conducted interviews. Michel-Cassidy holds MFAs in fiction/nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, in poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and in visual arts from the California College of the Arts. She has an editor’s certificate from University of California, Berkeley, and has attended residencies at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Breadloaf, and Tin House. In 2018, she was a cross-disciplinary resident at Gullkistan in Laugarvatn, Iceland. She is residency coordinator for the MFA in writing program at VCFA located at CalArts in Valencia, CA.