Poetry collection by Keisha-Gaye Anderson. 

“Keisha-Gaye Anderson’s Everything Is Necessary brings readers into the intimate heart of a Jamaican-American woman’s complicated world. Her poetry explores the many ways in which the African Diaspora is carried within our bodies, on our tongues—from sufferings under enslavement to the precarity of modern American life. She uses migration stories and difficult family history to express the interplay of economic status, aspiration for something, anything better, harsh love, discipline, and courage. This is a necessary collection from a poet who is hitting her stride.”

— PATRICIA SPEARS JONES, author of A Lucent Fire and winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize

“Everything Is Necessary is a ‘controlled explosion.’ Anderson is not interested in tidy tales of familial fairytales or neatly packaged travesties—rather, the poet’s journey is that of meditation, reincarnation, and ancestral lineage inside the portal of her DNA (remember, remember, remember).”

— ANASTACIA RENÉE, author of (v.), Forget It, and Answer(Me)

“In Everything Is Necessary, Keisha-Gaye Anderson takes all the instruments at her disposal— things to make music, things with which to cook, stones that have blocked her way, that have made her at times detour, and fashioned these into weapons, things to keep the enemy at bay, spikes to line the wall, to give us time while we work this freedom into recognizable, familiar, manageable form, to give the refugee a home, at last, to help us recognize brother and sister, whatever state they come to us in. Go with her. She is determined to find a way.”

— MERVYN TAYLOR, author of Voices Carry

KEISHA-GAYE ANDERSON is a Jamaican-born poet, author, and visual artist. She is the author of the poetry collection Gathering the Waters (Jamii 2014) and A Spell for Living (Agape Editions 2019), which received the Editors’ Choice recognition for the 2017 Numinous Orisons, Luminous Origin Literary Award for Poetry. Keisha’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been published widely in literary magazines and journals, including Renaissance Noire, Small Axe Salon, The Killens Review of Arts and Letters, Mosaic Literary Magazine, The Literary Journal, and African Voices Magazine. Keisha is a past participant of the VONA Voices and Callaloo writing workshops, and was short-listed for the Small Axe Literary Competition. In 2018, she was named an Artist in Residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. Keisha is a graduate of the Syracuse University Newhouse School and holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from The City College, CUNY. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children.