Black Girl in the Ring
By Delores Mullings | Breakwater Books | $19.95
Sobia Shaheen Shaikh
When I opened Dr. Delores Mullings’s debut poetry collection, Black Girl in the Ring (Breakwater Books, 2026), I knew I was going to be moved. However, I did not expect the journey through geography, time, memory, grief, and love. A friend and co-conspirator in academic and community spaces, Mullings is someone whose work I have encountered across many of the struggles that animate this collection. Yet the collection is more than a record of a life. It is a cartography and genealogy of Black womanhood, tracing journeys through Jamaica, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and across the world. It meditates on the intertwined histories of family, migration, racism, institutional violence, love, and survival.
The collection moves fluidly between the autobiographical and the collective. Mullings writes from intimate experiences of childhood, family, sexuality, ageing, work, and loss, while situating them within longer histories of slavery, sexism, colonialism, anti-Blackness, and Black women’s resistance. The poems vary in form, voice, and dialect—direct, lyrical, metaphorical, elliptical—but consistently carry the force of a first-person speaker who is both witness and participant. In the titular poem, “Black Girl in the Ring,” she writes of a woman “marking the distance she would travel / a lifetime and back again.” Movement across geography becomes movement through histories of race, gender, family, and migration.
Geography is never simply backdrop. Place carries memory, history, and contradiction. Newfoundland and Labrador, in particular, emerges as a place of belonging and exclusion, intimacy and estrangement. In “New,” reflecting on her role at Memorial University, Mullings writes, “I have a key, a Memorial key / that locks me in / and locks me out.” The image captures the complicated relationship between belonging and institutional exclusion, while locating that tension within a distinctly Newfoundland and Labrador landscape.
But the journey Mullings maps is also a journey through white supremacy. Racism is not an abstraction or metaphor: it is embodied, institutional, historical, interpersonal, and painfully familiar. Mullings makes visible the contradictions of women’s and social justice-oriented organizations that speak the language of reconciliation, anti-racism, and equity while reproducing racial violence. In “Eat Their Young (For Marina),” she turns institutional vocabulary into something visceral: “Truth and Reconciliation / anti-Blackness, / anti-racism, / Indigenization, / all play hide and seek.” The poem’s closing line—“It’s not personal.”—captures something central to the collection: structural violence may be institutional, but it is experienced through profoundly personal encounters.
Yet to read Black Girl in the Ring only as a book about violence would be to miss one of its deepest currents. Running alongside grief and anger is an insistence on Black joy, tenderness, beauty, and love. Mullings’ haikus and quieter poems provide moments of stillness, while recurring images of the moon suggest both constancy and change. These moments do not offer an escape from violence; instead, they remind us of what white supremacy cannot fully contain: the capacity to love, wonder, remember, and find beauty in an imperfect world.
This is what makes the collection so compelling. Mullings documents anti-Blackness and misogynoir without allowing them to become the whole story. Her poems move across generations and geographies, but also toward possibility. Black Girl in the Ring is both witness and love letter: a record of the places where white supremacy leaves its marks and of the Black joy, tenderness, and resistance that refuse to disappear.
Sobia Shaheen Shaikh is a creative writer, playwright, community organizer, and academic whose work bridges art, activism, and scholarship.