She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks

Brilliant, lyrical, and passionate, this collection from the acclaimed poet m. nourbeSe philip is an extended jazz riff running along the themes of language, racism, colonialism, and exile. In this groundbreaking collection, philip defiantly challenges and resoundingly overthrows the silencing of black women through appropriation of language, offering no less than superb poetry resonant with beauty and strength.

She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks was originally published in 1989 and won the Casa de Las Americas Prize. This new edition includes an introduction by Katherine McKittrick.

m. nourbeSe philip is a renowned poet, essayist, and playwright, and practiced law for seven years before becoming a writer. She received the 2020 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, as well as the 2021 Molson Prize, the Canada Council for the Arts’ lifetime achievement award, for her “invaluable contributions to literature.” Born in Tobago, she lives in Toronto.

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She authored Dear Science and Other Stories (DUP, 2021), and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (UMP, 2006). She also edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (DUP, 2015) and Heartbreak and Other Geographies (UMP, 2026). Recent collaborative projects include the limited-edition boxset Trick Not Telos (2023), the limited-edition hand-made book Twenty Dreams (2024), and the installation A Smile Split by the Stars honouring nourbeSe philip (2025).

“[She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks] tries to catch the deadly dictionary in the act of definition. Philip snatches the language of (Greek) myth, (colonial) law, (English) grammar book, and (Christian) catechism with all its ‘eucharistic contradictions’ to perform the many ways the African experience in the New World has been formed and deformed by language systems hostile to its flourishing.”―Carina del Velle Schorske, Boston Review

“At every turn, she interrogates colonial language culture. Through repeating phrases with minor alterations, Philip brings us in on the ambivalent performance of language cultures across bodies”―Joseph Houlihan, Entropy

“NourbeSe Philip insists on the impossibility of forgetting what has been lost even as we move into uncertain futures―an insistence that gestures toward the totality of a diasporic culture, and this a return of the dispersed to a new home. In the interim She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks is a fully realized, moving paean to that possibility.”―Tyrone Williams, Chicago Review

“Twenty years before Philip wrote Zong!, she wrote She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks. Every golden age is a renaissance―while at the same time remembering, with pleasure, the way the route of this masterwork has so far bypassed both Europe and the United States. She Tries Her Tongue―the first manuscript of a poet born in Tobago [now living] in Canada―came into the world as the winner of Cuba’s prestigious Casa de Las Américas prize.”―Zinzi Clemmons, Literary Hub

“Over the edge of writing that lays claim to the adjectives conceptual and experimental, M. NourbeSe Philip lights the way back into the very ground, the very terror of the concept and the experiment. Tried and errant, reordering with every expense of air every expanse of earth and sea, breaking silence in silence’s elemental break, like Hölderlin, Philip’s tragic transport―as a curate of the impure word, the degeneration and regeneration of grammar, their rupture and their fullness―bears the black history of romance. No sojourn in contemporary poetry is more necessary or more beautiful than hers.”―Fred Moten

“Since the original publication of She Tries Her Tongue, the critical community has been catching up with NourbeSe Philip’s seismic poetic voice and her radical philological project―continued in Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence and Zong! This collection should be required reading for all students of Caribbean art and literature.”―Emily Greenwood, author of Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

“She Tries Her Tongue richly touches upon the difficult intertwining of race, gender, sexuality, history, and language. No other work brings these concerns so centrally to readers.”―Samantha Pinto, author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic