Ama Codjoe

Biography

Ama Codjoe is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Bluest Nude (Milkweed, 2022). Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. 

See Work

POETRY / Summer 2021

Bathers with a Turtle

By Ama Codjoe

Three nudes crudely drawn. One crouching, 

back turned, right hand feeding the turtle 

of the painting’s title; another sitting, as if in a chair,

head bowed, eyes downcast; and a central 

POETRY / Summer 2021

Heaven as Olympic Spa

By Ama Codjoe

Koreatown, Los Angeles

Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.
I stared into her bespectacled eyes.

Ms. Brooks showed me how 
to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin

POETRY / Summer 2021

Aubade

By Ama Codjoe

after Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt (1969)

My back is turned from him again, 
but this time I’m not hunched 
over the quilt—his rough thumbs 
gripping my waist—I’m standing 

POETRY / Spring 2018

My Nothings

By Ama Codjoe

You don’t dress your mouth
in my blouse. My body crinkled

POETRY / Spring 2018

The Thoroughbred

By Ama Codjoe

There is, in a nearby field, a retired show horse living out
whatever days it can win, a white horse speckled with brown
flecks. Its limp mane welcomes your hand. On its face,

POETRY / Spring 2018

Of Being Sick and Tired

By Ama Codjoe

I’m tired of being a woman. I walk
into grocery stores and laundromats wet
with the cracked face of a maidenhead
lurching across the Atlantic.

POETRY / Spring 2018

Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds

By Ama Codjoe

I’m fourteen and the smell of singed hair
circles me like the halo of a pre-Renaissance
Madonna. Loss already on my face.
A summer crush holds out his fingers