COVER REVEAL—Carolyn Cooley Joyner

We now have a final cover design for Carolyn Cooley Joyner's debut poetry collection Imagine His Mother Witnessing—Now available for pre-order directly from Indolent Books. Order yours now!

Imagine His Mother Witnessing
by Carolyn Cooley Joyner

Pre-order yours now at 20% off retail price

Books ship in Q1 2026

Here’s what people are saying about Carolyn Cooley Joyner’s
Imagine His Mother Witnessing

In Imagine His Mother Witnessing, Carolyn Cooley Joyner picks up where Langston Hughes left off in “Mother to Son,” to expand maternal wisdom into an epic journey. These poems read like a sacred text, a group of psalms both for the healing of loss and for the raising of a generation to come. Joyner, a master poet whose poems have inspired many for years, offers the gift of a long-awaited full collection, and the wait was well worth it: It’s “Now [we] need to hear [her] hushed voice speak.” Part elegy, part sonnet, part love poem, part Blues…it doesn’t matter where you enter; there’s a lesson, even a balm, for us all.
—A. Van Jordan

With heartbreakingly clear language, Carolyn Cooley Joyner counters platitudes of comfort with an unflinching account of her son’s final illness and her subsequent grief. Although “everything [is] backlit with his absence,” the son becomes vividly present even as the poet delves deeply into her own sorrow. Using a variety of strategies and forms, including a crown of “broken” sonnets that address the son directly, Joyner creates an emotionally complex blend of praisesong and lament that will be a welcome companion to anyone experiencing grief, and a gift to others as well.
—Martha Collins

Written after the devastating loss of a child, Imagine His Mother Witnessing is a work of deepest urgency. Over mortal thresholds, the text emerges as an act of continued mothering as Carolyn Cooley Joyner attends to the death of her beloved son, Damon. In facing the incomprehensible, imagination is forced into new shape. “This passing grows me around/ a jagged blade...” Incisive and honest—shining with lyrical wisdom—this book is a grieving, polytemporal record utterly forged by love and unceasing devotion.
—Aracelis Girmay