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We Alive, Beloved: Poems
NYT Bestselling Author, Frederick Joseph, explores a new genre in this captivating poetry collection that seeks to find joy in moments of difficulty whether through illuminating the beauty of being Black, highlighting the hope that can be found in childhood, or by sharing intimate truths revealed on a mental health journey. This book will appeal to both new and established readers of poetry.
Step into the world of We Alive, Beloved , where its words will resonate within the deepest corners of your soul, leaving a mark on your heart and a renewed appreciation for the beauty of being alive.
We Alive, Beloved moves beyond being a poetry collection; it's a celebration of the profound aspects of our existence. Each poem seeks to immortalize the fleeting moments of joy, love, resilience, and inspiration that often slip through the grasp of our fast-paced lives.
In this poetic testament, we defy the ephemeral nature of beauty and goodness, daring to clutch onto these facets of life for just a little longer. With words that stand as guardians against the relentless march of time and the ceaseless tides of change, trauma, and grief, this collection becomes a sanctuary of light in a world that sometimes seems dim.
We Alive, Beloved explores a rich tapestry of themes, from the intricacies of relationships and the heartache of loss, to the wide-eyed wonder of existence and the challenges of exploring the possibility of parenthood in our modern age. Each poem reaches out to readers, offering a mirror to their own journeys and emotions, inviting them to be seen and acknowledged in its lyrical embrace.
Step into the world of We Alive, Beloved , where its words will resonate within the deepest corners of your soul, leaving a mark on your heart and a renewed appreciation for the beauty of being alive.
We Alive, Beloved moves beyond being a poetry collection; it's a celebration of the profound aspects of our existence. Each poem seeks to immortalize the fleeting moments of joy, love, resilience, and inspiration that often slip through the grasp of our fast-paced lives.
In this poetic testament, we defy the ephemeral nature of beauty and goodness, daring to clutch onto these facets of life for just a little longer. With words that stand as guardians against the relentless march of time and the ceaseless tides of change, trauma, and grief, this collection becomes a sanctuary of light in a world that sometimes seems dim.
We Alive, Beloved explores a rich tapestry of themes, from the intricacies of relationships and the heartache of loss, to the wide-eyed wonder of existence and the challenges of exploring the possibility of parenthood in our modern age. Each poem reaches out to readers, offering a mirror to their own journeys and emotions, inviting them to be seen and acknowledged in its lyrical embrace.
128 pages, Paperback
Published June 18, 2024
30 people are currently reading
4531 people want to read
About the author
Frederick Joseph
10 books438 followersFrederick Joseph is a Yonkers, NY raised three-time New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. His books include a poetry collection, We Alive, Beloved, two books of nonfiction, Patriarchy Blues, and The Black Friend, a collaboration, Better Than We Found It, a children’s book, The Courage to Dream, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and his recent bestselling, Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly Starred reviewed YA novel, This Thing of Ours.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
March 11, 2024
Wow. Speechless. When poetry is at its best it, cuts me to my core and puts language to feelings I have never been able to articulate. This collection did all that and more for me. It reminded me how I felt when I first read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen for the first time, truly gutted and utterly seen. Half of this book is highlighted and bookmarked, and I cannot wait to get a physical copy when it comes out for all of the world to be in awe of. I’m not an avid poetry lover, but this is incredible. It comes out in June. Preorder now or run to your closest bookstore on the 11th.
June 25, 2024
I have been a fan of this authors work for a while. This collection is so beautifully written.
June 25, 2024
An absolutely gorgeous book - meant to be savored and read over and over again.
November 18, 2024
“Why should I celebrate a nation where tomorrow remains a coin toss?”
July 12, 2024
Hooked with the first poem, “Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda.” Author draws reader into the experience.
June 25, 2024
Absolutely beautiful collection and some of the best poetry I’ve ever read. I found myself wanting to share and send every poem to someone I love.
September 18, 2024
I’ve been following Frederick Joseph on Substack for a while. He has painfully and beautifully articulated so many of my feelings about the world, including the fragility, beauty, and pain of it all. This poetry collection is a gift to the literary world that I will reflect upon repeatedly. Make sure you listen to the audio version, while following along with the written, because the author reads his poetry, and it is everything.
June 30, 2024
This book is so beautifully written. I cannot recommend this book enough. It captures every emotion, the depth and breadth of life itself. I pre-ordered this book and it was well worth the wait.
February 11, 2025
If you’re a fan of poetry, you’ll want to read this collection. Absolutely gorgeous writing that will leave its mark on you. A collection to be read once, and then again. And again.
October 21, 2025
for myself cause i'll probably forget why i rated this what i did, most of it was just personal preference stuff
1 1/2 maybe? idk how to rate poetry collections as wholes
some of it was wayyy too literal for my personal taste, some of it felt like it was trying to be deep using metaphors that didn't really make sense, to me anyways, it felt like they were just there for the sake of being there and looking good. it also felt very very repetitive, not only in the subject but in words, i would love to see a count on the word 'marrow'. as for the subject, there's nothing wrong with an overarching theme, but when it's just the same thing reiterated over and over using the same words, it gets slightly mundane. it also felt a little off kilter just because of a couple oddballs thrown in there with no relevance at all to said theme. but anyways, i do see the importance of the collection. i would also like to add, For the Good Times and In Another Life were beautiful to me and will linger for quite a while.
1 1/2 maybe? idk how to rate poetry collections as wholes
some of it was wayyy too literal for my personal taste, some of it felt like it was trying to be deep using metaphors that didn't really make sense, to me anyways, it felt like they were just there for the sake of being there and looking good. it also felt very very repetitive, not only in the subject but in words, i would love to see a count on the word 'marrow'. as for the subject, there's nothing wrong with an overarching theme, but when it's just the same thing reiterated over and over using the same words, it gets slightly mundane. it also felt a little off kilter just because of a couple oddballs thrown in there with no relevance at all to said theme. but anyways, i do see the importance of the collection. i would also like to add, For the Good Times and In Another Life were beautiful to me and will linger for quite a while.
March 22, 2025
At times, some of these poems felt like first drafts. I'm sure there's a better way to allude to the fact you're in your therapist's office without straight up telling us. HOWEVER this feeling only persisted at the beginning of the book, and by the end, I no longer felt that way and no longer cared.
I wrote "If My Dog Isn't God" and "If There Is a God Who Listens" in my planner so I can have them forever.
I loved this book.
Total score: 5/5 Stars
I wrote "If My Dog Isn't God" and "If There Is a God Who Listens" in my planner so I can have them forever.
I loved this book.
Total score: 5/5 Stars
September 8, 2024
"Among glass shards of disappointment, in the throes
of loss and mausoleums built of regrets,
nestled deep in the trenches of daily tragedies,
you still dream. You still try."
-from "Session II: You Still Try"
This collection was [insert a comprehensible adjective to encompass the magnitude with which these poems moved me]. I highly recommend this poetry collection.
of loss and mausoleums built of regrets,
nestled deep in the trenches of daily tragedies,
you still dream. You still try."
-from "Session II: You Still Try"
This collection was [insert a comprehensible adjective to encompass the magnitude with which these poems moved me]. I highly recommend this poetry collection.
December 2, 2024
some hit really hard & some didn’t, but that’s most poetry books for me. overall a solid experience.
100% recommend poetry audiobooks read by their author. i feel like a big party of poetry is HOW it’s read, so the author is able to convey the original feelings of it better than anyone.
100% recommend poetry audiobooks read by their author. i feel like a big party of poetry is HOW it’s read, so the author is able to convey the original feelings of it better than anyone.
August 30, 2024
Achingly beautiful.
October 3, 2024
A new-to-me, favorite author! His poems evoked tears in my eyes and also puzzled expressions at times. His advocacy for more Black voices and presence in the world was moving and oh so compelling.
June 12, 2025
Beautiful
July 4, 2025
# 2025 Reading Challenge # Read a collection of poetry
August 29, 2025
10/10, 100/100, 5 stars, and any other way I can heap praise upon these poems. Powerful, beautiful, resonant.
August 18, 2024
This book is like no other.
I’ve read poetry and verse before but nothing comes through like this book.
The pain, the hope, the perseverance. I read this book before loosing a relative and I found myself picking it up over the last week to read a few pieces from the book for comfort.
This book is a must purchase you will read it, marinate on it, and revisit it like any classic or friendship.
I’ve read poetry and verse before but nothing comes through like this book.
The pain, the hope, the perseverance. I read this book before loosing a relative and I found myself picking it up over the last week to read a few pieces from the book for comfort.
This book is a must purchase you will read it, marinate on it, and revisit it like any classic or friendship.
August 19, 2024
‘If you are not an ocean, then explain how too much of you feels like drowning, but too little of us leaves me lifeless?‘
Amazing book of poetry. I found it very raw in its emotions and vulnerability, which was great to read (listen to). Joseph is honest in his struggles of blackness in the world, and the nuances of love, relationships and how one sees oneself in this life. The audiobook was even more impactful, in my opinion, because Joseph was reading it himself. Phenomenal book!
Amazing book of poetry. I found it very raw in its emotions and vulnerability, which was great to read (listen to). Joseph is honest in his struggles of blackness in the world, and the nuances of love, relationships and how one sees oneself in this life. The audiobook was even more impactful, in my opinion, because Joseph was reading it himself. Phenomenal book!
June 21, 2025
Beautifully written, though provoking, powerful poetry that fuses music, joy, sorrow, marriage, and so much more, into a telling of the modern-day Black experience.
Most short story or poetry collections are tricky for me to rate, as some pieces I love and others I don’t. But this was different. Every single poem has something gorgeous and profound to offer.
Most short story or poetry collections are tricky for me to rate, as some pieces I love and others I don’t. But this was different. Every single poem has something gorgeous and profound to offer.
September 23, 2024
Fred’s words are beautiful, heavy, necessary, enlightening, sad and important. So grateful he’s chosen to share them with us.
These are my favorite poems from this book:
Session II: You Still Try | Page 47
In the belly of your heaviest days
Shadows dance as if they swallowed the sun.
When trauma's ghosts threaten to erase desires you penciled in,
And heartache makes a home in the marrow of your bones, Sit with me, so we might hold a séance to resurrect your joy.
Let's trace a map of our existence, Invisible routes inked in the language of survivors.
Our scars are not catacombs
but star clusters, bridging nights to dawn.
How do we make sense of it all?
Listen to the stubborn hum of our heartbeats.
Like oak trees choked by a storm, with limbs bent and bark ragged— you are still here.
Among glass shards of disappointment, in the throes of loss and mausoleums built of regrets, nestled deep in the trenches of daily tragedies, you still dream. You still try.
See how you have weathered tantrums of grief and agony, those wild children, biting and clawing,
leaving welts upon your soul that bloom into resilience.
Your hands are not the remnants of rin
they are star-kissed, constellation-etched,
each line a proud declaration, each callus a song:
We alive, beloved.
At the Edge of Eternity | Page 60
In the quiet, you are there.
Your breath: a secret on the edge of sound dancing in the wind's whispers. A keepsake of a voice that sings to me. A reminder: atoms do not surrender to death.
Instead, they waltz beyond and with us,
a ballet of constancy woven through the fabric of time.
Our harmonies exist in the silence between heartbeats, Here, now, cradled in the past's palm, flowing to the ear of the future.
At the end, as in the beginning, our atoms remain undefeated.
These are my favorite poems from this book:
Session II: You Still Try | Page 47
In the belly of your heaviest days
Shadows dance as if they swallowed the sun.
When trauma's ghosts threaten to erase desires you penciled in,
And heartache makes a home in the marrow of your bones, Sit with me, so we might hold a séance to resurrect your joy.
Let's trace a map of our existence, Invisible routes inked in the language of survivors.
Our scars are not catacombs
but star clusters, bridging nights to dawn.
How do we make sense of it all?
Listen to the stubborn hum of our heartbeats.
Like oak trees choked by a storm, with limbs bent and bark ragged— you are still here.
Among glass shards of disappointment, in the throes of loss and mausoleums built of regrets, nestled deep in the trenches of daily tragedies, you still dream. You still try.
See how you have weathered tantrums of grief and agony, those wild children, biting and clawing,
leaving welts upon your soul that bloom into resilience.
Your hands are not the remnants of rin
they are star-kissed, constellation-etched,
each line a proud declaration, each callus a song:
We alive, beloved.
At the Edge of Eternity | Page 60
In the quiet, you are there.
Your breath: a secret on the edge of sound dancing in the wind's whispers. A keepsake of a voice that sings to me. A reminder: atoms do not surrender to death.
Instead, they waltz beyond and with us,
a ballet of constancy woven through the fabric of time.
Our harmonies exist in the silence between heartbeats, Here, now, cradled in the past's palm, flowing to the ear of the future.
At the end, as in the beginning, our atoms remain undefeated.
August 28, 2024
This is a poem I just wrote after my bedtime reading of @fredtjoseph latest book called We Alive Beloved. Please purchase his work and find him on substack. His books are fire, and this recent book of poetry is so moving. Buy it! Fredrick Joseph also gives half of his sales to those suffering in the Congo and in Palestine.
Two poems in
And I have to stop
To re-read the lines I’ve already read
Because they are medicine
No, they are whole nourishment
Think water on a hot summer day
But that’s not quite it either
It’s like being invisible you’re whole existence
Then suddenly: you’re seen and understood
He claims my scars are star clusters
And I look at the welts on my hands
And the holes in my heart
And I think, yeah, these are fucking stars
Testaments shining in the dark
My existence an act of resistance
I am a force, too ancient to erase
Yet soft enough, my trauma is
Imprinted on the back of my eyelids
But strong enough that collectively
My voice is heard over tyrants
Yet compassion is fertile in my heart
I have breathed in grief like shards of glass
Drank fear as if I was dying of thirst
And stood when the planet gave loose
But in Fred’s words:
We alive, Beloved.
God damn, I’m alive.
- Toni
Quick disclaimer: I am not Black. I will never know the effects of systemic racism. White America benefits me. But as a queer person, as someone who grew up in evangelical fundamentalism, grew up poor, endured abuse and trauma… I can resonate with so much of Fredrick Joseph’s lines. Because he generously writes for all of us.
Two poems in
And I have to stop
To re-read the lines I’ve already read
Because they are medicine
No, they are whole nourishment
Think water on a hot summer day
But that’s not quite it either
It’s like being invisible you’re whole existence
Then suddenly: you’re seen and understood
He claims my scars are star clusters
And I look at the welts on my hands
And the holes in my heart
And I think, yeah, these are fucking stars
Testaments shining in the dark
My existence an act of resistance
I am a force, too ancient to erase
Yet soft enough, my trauma is
Imprinted on the back of my eyelids
But strong enough that collectively
My voice is heard over tyrants
Yet compassion is fertile in my heart
I have breathed in grief like shards of glass
Drank fear as if I was dying of thirst
And stood when the planet gave loose
But in Fred’s words:
We alive, Beloved.
God damn, I’m alive.
- Toni
Quick disclaimer: I am not Black. I will never know the effects of systemic racism. White America benefits me. But as a queer person, as someone who grew up in evangelical fundamentalism, grew up poor, endured abuse and trauma… I can resonate with so much of Fredrick Joseph’s lines. Because he generously writes for all of us.
December 21, 2024
A collection of poems about love, desire, family, identity, being Black in America, survival, and joy.
from Notes from Therapy: "Write, rewrite, until the ink runs dry. / Let it startle you. Become a sunburst / In a winter sky, laughter in a room of silent faces, / Become raindrops tracing veins / Of a leaf, or unexpected ballads in city noise."
from I Don't Read Reviews: "My prose is the language of my heritage, / not riddles to be unraveled. Your review flutters / like uncertain feet on unfamiliar soil, / and I think, perhaps, you did not walk far enough / to see where I'm coming from."
from We Cry Together: "we spend weeks huddled around grief like a campfire, / Telling silent ghost stories about the people we stopped being / Just days before. Nurturing a flame so small it could be mistaken / for hope."
from Notes from Therapy: "Write, rewrite, until the ink runs dry. / Let it startle you. Become a sunburst / In a winter sky, laughter in a room of silent faces, / Become raindrops tracing veins / Of a leaf, or unexpected ballads in city noise."
from I Don't Read Reviews: "My prose is the language of my heritage, / not riddles to be unraveled. Your review flutters / like uncertain feet on unfamiliar soil, / and I think, perhaps, you did not walk far enough / to see where I'm coming from."
from We Cry Together: "we spend weeks huddled around grief like a campfire, / Telling silent ghost stories about the people we stopped being / Just days before. Nurturing a flame so small it could be mistaken / for hope."
August 22, 2024
I've been a follower of Fred Joseph for a few years, and I appreciate all of his work to advocate, educate and raise money for good causes. I was delighted to support him by preordering We Alive, Beloved, his first book of poetry. Themes of race, class, power, love and grief, and how to stay soft in a harsh world are weaved throughout this collection. Joseph knows how to turn a phrase and paints powerful pictures with his pen-the writing is beautiful, and some metaphors and images come up again and again.
My one disappointment was that a poem that he shared on Instagram, which saw me through some hard seasons, didn't make it into this book.
My one disappointment was that a poem that he shared on Instagram, which saw me through some hard seasons, didn't make it into this book.
September 30, 2024
I enjoyed this book immensely. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes poetry about the art of living good and bad. The celebration of life and bad things that we sometimes endure and the fact that we can find peace and happiness on the other side. I only wish I could write like him. His writing is like that of a Rolls-Royce compared to my Ford Model T.
December 15, 2024
‘Shall we gather tonight, in the ghost light?
So you might help me write the eulogy
For the people I once was.
No roses, no tears, just the quiet ritual
Of acknowledging the truth,
And letting it rest in the land of yesterday.
I nurture new seeds watered
with accountability wrung from my past selves.’
So you might help me write the eulogy
For the people I once was.
No roses, no tears, just the quiet ritual
Of acknowledging the truth,
And letting it rest in the land of yesterday.
I nurture new seeds watered
with accountability wrung from my past selves.’
January 6, 2025
Fantastic collection of poems. Fredrick Joseph deep dives into such a wide array of deeply personal topics highlighting his position as a black man and how it impacts his relationships, masculinity, and emotions. I highly recommend this to anyone trying to expand their collection of contemporary poetry
June 4, 2025
Was continuously torn between re-reading a poem several times to absorb each line and devouring the entire book so I could go back and read it again. Which I will be doing. His are words I want to commit to memory, to hear taught in classes, and to share with loved ones when I don’t have the right thing to say.
August 10, 2024
I loved this collection of poems so much! Great word-smithing from Frederick Joseph, who I love so much as a person and an activist. Very much connected with his poems as a teacher and as someone who cares deeply about others. Highly recommend!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews