“Reading Thick With Trouble by Amber McBride is the hoodoo holler handbook to counteract what ills us in this bleeding ‘house that drips’ called America. Here, freedom fights fluidly against spiritual and physical oppositions where ‘a ghost can't write a ghost story,’ but a Black woman can ‘gospel us into folklore.’ I stand in awe before this offering of dark principles, divinations at the blade edge of an enjambment, and dire metamorphoses. ‘Prayer rubs soft, gives way to clouds— /skulls crack and crack,’ she writes, and I believe in the prophet of this forecast. So should you.”—Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny

“Thick with Trouble is a collection that sings like a chorus, an evocative and ancient kind of singing, incantatory and empowered. With poetic forms that challenge and surprise, Thick with Trouble is a knowing debut that subverts perceptions with lyricism, and calls upon the supernatural and ancestral to complicate and enlighten our collective gaze.”—Rio Cortez, author of Golden Ax

“This book fascinated me immediately because it’s broken into five sections based on reimagined tarot cards. As if that wasn’t interesting enough all on its own, the language McBride uses instantly transported me to a unique poetic space. In this collection, life cycles are examined in a manner that centers women and asks timely questions about what it means to be trouble, cause trouble, or get into trouble. The collection is as beautiful as it is powerful.” —Book Riot