Salisa Lynne Grant’s debut collection of poetry is a Black mother’s ode to her lost son as much as it is a songbook for Black resilience. Grant does not refrain from allowing readers to bear witness to her pain, her loss, and her intuitive understanding of living through trauma. In these Black Hands captures the collective “sweets and sours” of Black life and illustrates empowering passages of Black love. Calling on the power and precedents from Anna Julia Cooper to Ntozake Shange, from Zora Neale Hurston to the Ferguson Uprising, Grant tenderly acknowledges the fires that have forged her people as well as the light that lives within them. Grant’s poems provide a looking glass and a legend for the joyful, eternal, and harrowing stories that fill our lives.