Clemency

CLEMENCY: poems to help you accept the apologies you will never receive is not soft.
It’s not a slow unraveling.
It’s a scream into a pillow after you’ve buried your ex and survived your mother’s silence.

Written by Queen Sheba, 2x (2025 & 2024) Grammy®-Nominated Spoken Word-Poet. This book is a grenade disguised as a collection. These are not poems for the faint of heart—these are confessions, witness statements, indictments, and love letters to women who stay too long and people who leave without warning.

What happens when you do not overcome?
What happens when therapy is not enough, when God is tired of hearing about it, and your ex’s new partner is at the funeral?
What happens when you’ve abused someone because you never healed from your own abuse?

Sheba answers with raw, intimate honesty—detailing breakups that feel like autopsies, queerness that gets questioned at the pulpit, and the unbearable truths Black women carry in silence.

Inside are poems that:

• imagine strangling the woman who told her son she’s going to hell for loving a woman

• confront suicide with a Sharpie and an open flame

• pull readers into domestic violence with no trigger warning and no exit

• remember Christmases in footed pajamas in a white household that raised a Black child with pink ribbons and word games

• celebrate queer desire, orgasm, rage, and resurrection with unapologetic clarity

CLEMENCY is divided into five sections—each one an exhale of survival:

1. Whether Pains – the ache before the breaking

2. This is America – the protest, the mourning, the indictment

3. Refracted Light – what healing looks like under a microscope

4. Clemency – poems that hold forgiveness at gunpoint

5. The Bridge, The Olive Branch, The Mustard Seed – the path back to self, if you’re lucky

This book is an MFA thesis turned altar. A eulogy turned battle cry. It was edited by National Book Award Nominee Claudia Rankine and National Book Award Winner Ada Limón—then rewritten in the shadow of heartbreak and buried girlfriends.

CLEMENCY is not about closure. It’s about continuing anyway.

If you’ve ever screamed in the shower, held back your own text message, or begged God not to let you die in a relationship—you are not alone.

These poems know what you’ve survived.
And they still want you to live.

Booking & Press: bookingqueensheba@gmail.com
connect: @thequeensheba www.thequeensheba.live