Kindle Unlimited
Unlimited reading. Over 4 million titles. Learn more
OR
Kindle Price: $9.99

Save $8.00 (44%)

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Audiobook Price: $11.80

Save: $2.81 (24%)

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Buy for others

Give as a gift or purchase for a team or group.
Learn more

Buying and sending eBooks to others

  1. Select quantity
  2. Buy and send eBooks
  3. Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

We Want Our Bodies Back: Poems Kindle Edition

4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 173 ratings

“WE WANT OUR BODIES BACK URGES BLACK WOMEN TO DEMAND BETTER FROM MEN.” -ESSENCE

“MASTER POET JESSICA CARE MOORE GIFTS US THIS LATEST COLLECTION OF SHARP, SMART AND DEFIANT PIECES.” -MS. MAGAZINE

BOOKS BY BLACK WOMEN WE CAN’T WAIT TO READ IN 2020 -REFINERY29

A dazzling full-length collection of verse from one of the leading poets of our time.

Over the past two decades, jessica Care moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women’s creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race. Fierce and passionate, Jessica Care moore argues that Black women spend their lives building a physical and emotional shelter to protect themselves from misogyny, criminalization, hatred, stereotypes, sexual assault, objectification, patriarchy, and death threats.

We Want Our Bodies Back is an exploration—and defiant stance against—these many attacks.

Read more Read less

Add a debit or credit card to save time when you check out
Convenient and secure with 2 clicks. Add your card

Editorial Reviews

Review

“moore provides a blueprint for how to veer outside of fixed expectations and still remain unflinching in her love for herself.” — The Mantle

We Want Our Bodies Back is a lyric encyclopedia, a psalm book, a conflagration of fire and fierce black joy. And jessica Care moore is the 21st Century poet warrior America desperately needs.”  — Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate

“Our plump, perfect, shea-buttered bodies. Our sun-scarred sinewy selves. Our stout tree-trunks, our walls. Our muscled forearms, our thick thighs, our phenomenal asses. Our weary hands. Forever, black women have shouldered the weight of the same world that denies their power and sway. The inimitable jessica Care moore—who has spent her life singing the most forceful notes of our soundtrack—is calling an end to that now.  If We Want Our Bodies Back empowers you, it was meant to. If this book frightens you, it should.” — Patricia Smith, poet, playwright, author of Incendiary Art

“jessica Care moore is my hero. Powerful, beautiful, excellent and unapologetically Black. She is who I want to be when I grow up. Her writing allows us to be seen for who we truly are.” — Talib Kweli, rapper, entrepreneur, and activist

"There are many times that jessica Care moore's work has made me spend hours figuring out how much of her work would be socially acceptable to steal. I really wish she had put this out while I was writing my last album." — Boots Riley, director, emcee, Sorry to Bother You 

“Imbued with heartache, anger, celebration, and rejuvenation, the poems in We Want Our Bodies Back reflect the sui generis funktified flyness that jessica Care moore has exemplified as an independent artist, activist, publisher, and curator for nearly a quarter-century. Perhaps the premier resistance writer in America today, moore furnishes luminous poetic signposts for our treacherous journey through the gloomy landscapes of 21st century America.” — Tony Bolden, author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture

We Want Our Bodies Back is a soaring resistance/upright bass/instrument of war. Here are poems that seek out my pain. A soldier allowed their childhood, a people returned to their Detroit. In a time of cobalt-imperialism, someone is still writing songs about God. Yes, revolution is exhausting, but we make countries; you and I.”  — Tongo Eisen Martin, author, Heaven is All Goodbyes

About the Author

jessica Care moore is the founder and CEO of Moore Black Press, executive producer of Black WOMEN Rock!, and founder of the literacy-driven, Jess Care Moore Foundation. An internationally renowned poet, playwright, performance artist, and producer, she is the 2013 Alain Locke Award recipient from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Moore is the author of The Words Don't Fit in My Mouth, The Alphabet Versus the Ghetto, and Love is Not the Enemy, a memoir. Her work has been published in numerous literary collections and she has performed on stages such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the London Institute for Contemporary Arts. jessica lives and writes in Detroit with her son.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07TW5NV9L
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Amistad (March 31, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 31, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1619 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 173 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
jessica Care moore
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

jessica Care moore is an internationally renowned, award-winning poet.

She is the Executive Producer and Founder of the 15-year old rock & roll concert and empowerment weekend, Black WOMEN Rock! moore is strong believer in institution building and created Moore Black Press Publishing in 1997, and began publishing her peers, Saul Williams, asha bandele, Danny Simmons, and Newark Mayor and poet, Ras Baraka. and others. She is an educator and strong advocate for youth and women's voices.

moore is the author of The Words Don’t Fit in My Mouth, The Alphabet Verses The Ghetto, God is Not an American, Sunlight Through Bullet Holes, and the forthcoming We Want Our Bodies Back. (Harper Collins). Her full scale theatrical work, Salt City, (A Techno Choreopoem) premiered in Detroit in 2019.

She is the 2018 Joyce Award Winner, 2017 Knight Arts Recipient, 2016 Kresge Art Fellow, The 2013 Alain Locke Awardee and the 2015 NAACP Great Expectation Award.

She's read her work and leant her powerful voice to many causes all over the world, including, UN World Aids Day NYC, Shanghai's Iron Mic and Concrete & Grass Music Festival, and joined poets from around the world at the International Flupp Literary Festival in Rio De Janeiro. Her work has graced the stages of The Apollo Theater, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her critically acclaimed jazz soul album, Black Tea - The Legend of Jessi James was released by emcee, Talib Kweli's Javotti Media Label.

The poet captivated a national television audience in the 90's when she won the the legendary “It’s Showtime at the Apollo” competition a record breaking five times in a row -- with a poem.

moore's poetry and voice is prominently featured on the 4th floor of the Smithsonian's New National Museum of African American History.

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5
173 global ratings
She adds the thorns to her Roses
5 Stars
She adds the thorns to her Roses
Ms. Moore draws you in with the scent of Roses and you grab too quickly and find your fingers pierced by thorns. The thorns she has known and that compelled her to share her life/pain/days and nights in deeply felt lessons. Read this book slowly and sip or gulp it down, either way you will be touched. And hopefully you will grasp the meaning of the lovingly angry title. Ernie Paniccioli Author.
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry, there was an error
Sorry we couldn't load the review

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2023
We Want Our Bodies Back: Poems by Jessica Care Moore is filled with poems that reminded me that every body is beautiful even when that beauty is obscured, denied, or unseen. Moore details the joys and the abuses the body encounters throughout life with an unassailable emphasis on the bodies of women, the bodies of people of color, and particularly women of color. We Want Our Bodies Back is sometimes a plea, sometimes a demand, sometimes a celebration in this collection of poetry that balances strength, beauty, and vulnerability in its calls for justice and acceptance and sometimes just to be seen. Moore reminds us that every unique body has things in common with every other body. We Want Our Bodies Back is a strong, beautiful statement of rebellion in a world where people's bodies are overpoliced, overlooked, and overexposed.
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2020
jessica Care moore’s We Want Our Bodies Back reads like a favorite album; one keeps finding new things, new sounds, new testimony, new landscape, new experience each time it is in your hand. When it is not in your hand it is on your mind, tapping at your heart. This book whispers and sings and rings and shouts and roars. This is poetry in prophetic voice—clear and ringing inside its pronouncement of terror, grief, resistance, beauty and joy. For all the sites this work takes you where black bodies are misunderstood, misused, and maligned moore's language arrives with its own battle tested assurance. Moore reminds us all, Black bodies make it to the future if only because every other future has already been wrought, imagined, re-imagined in a black woman’s hands.
Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2023
Could not put it down, read it from beginning to end! Great read!
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2020
I read this book slowly, from cover to cover. I savored it. I rarely do that with poetry books anymore but as a Black woman, this spoke to me in ways other poetry books don't. It spoke to me in ways other poetry books can't. It spoke to the woman in me, the Black woman in me, the poet in me, the writer in me, the child in me, the person in me, and the human that I am.

Nayyirah Waheed once wrote, "all the women in me are tired"

Today, because of this book, all the women in me, all of the Black women in me, are alive.
8 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2020
Husband bought this among other books to try an understand the issues we deal with as black women. He enjoyed the poems but this isn't a one stop shop book. It's a great read but I would also recommend reading other books written by black women as well if you are trying to understand.
One person found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2020
Ms. Moore draws you in with the scent of Roses and you grab too quickly and find your fingers pierced by thorns. The thorns she has known and that compelled her to share her life/pain/days and nights in deeply felt lessons. Read this book slowly and sip or gulp it down, either way you will be touched. And hopefully you will grasp the meaning of the lovingly angry title. Ernie Paniccioli Author.
Customer image
5.0 out of 5 stars She adds the thorns to her Roses
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2020
Ms. Moore draws you in with the scent of Roses and you grab too quickly and find your fingers pierced by thorns. The thorns she has known and that compelled her to share her life/pain/days and nights in deeply felt lessons. Read this book slowly and sip or gulp it down, either way you will be touched. And hopefully you will grasp the meaning of the lovingly angry title. Ernie Paniccioli Author.
Images in this review
Customer image
Customer image
One person found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2021
Jessica is one of the best poets ever! Her passion, truth telling, and artistry with words will keep you enthralled and in tuned with one's own experience. I am a hug fan of her work and highly recommended her power books and projects.
One person found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2021
Powerful and insightful. I read it in a few hours, but had to reread it, just to ensure I properly digested everything
One person found this helpful
Report
Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?