From Chicago’s 2020 Youth Poet Laureate, Waning is an imaginative yet grounded coming-of-age exploration.
As the moon cycles through phases of reflection, release, and recovery, the speaker in Nué’s collection moves through their own transformative journey. Waning commits to interior questions of Blackness, witness, desire, forgiveness, and what it means to take up space in ways that are healing and liberatory. With wisdom and vulnerability, these lyrical poems interrogate labor in all its iterations: community, survival, and most importantly, who we show up whole for each of our evolving selves.
Publication date: May 3, 2022
“Waning is an ode to interior space. Invoking the moon as a symbol for our own emotional phases and cycles, these poems invite us to look unflinchingly at our most shadowy parts and find them worthy of love. Nué writes, "I am trying to become friends with loneliness" -- a courageous act in the face of a society that values productivity over the ability to cultivate a deep love and knowledge of ourselves.”
—Jamila Woods, singer, poet
“Nue Foster’s Waning is a tender reminder. Children of the sun, and faces of the moon, we are an earthly body. Growing and moving in truth, identity and passion. Who’s to judge how we got here? When we depend on the sky to know where we come from.”
—E’mon Lauren Black, author of Commando, Chicago’s First Youth Poet Laureate
“I was in my late thirties before I had the luxury of knowing what taking up space was all about. However, this human has shown us that all things including the moon have multiple dimensions and just like the moon, we are changing whether we want to or not. And we are all asking to be seen.
—Fredia Gee
