Breathe

“Deeply cathartic and resonant for parents attempting to raise their children with intention and integrity. Imani Perry shows deep compassion for both parents and children . . . while incisively underlining the realities of raising Black boys in a country that will inherently betray them. It is a book filled with love and insight for difficult times.” —Tarana Burke “There are moments when a piece of writing is so honest, so personal, that it crawls into us . . . . Breathe is that. Perry gives us a look into what it means to love her children—her Black sons—in a world that may not. What it means to arm them with information, history, culture, spirit, pride, and joy. What it means to celebrate with them the vastness of their lineage and the tight network of community, which affords them an impenetrable freedom to be. To just . . . be. And as Perry gives this to her sons—her family—with such candor and respect, I couldn’t help but hear my own mother speaking her truth, our truth, to me.” —Jason Reynolds, author of the Track series: Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu “Perry urges her sons to hold history but not be hindered by it. She is determined that the dissonance that accompanies growing up young and black in this country is not destiny. This book is an honest examination of the contradictions that make us whole and human. Breathe is a love letter to and about us all.” —Phillip Agnew, codirector of the Dream Defenders “Imani Perry wants her young sons ‘to make beauty and love in a genocidal time.’ Bless them! And bless her, for this book is a wonderful model for doing just that! So much joy and caring and pain and rage distilled into soaring, striking sentences.” —Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana “Before reading Breathe, I knew that Imani Perry was the most important cultural worker in my professional life. But I had no idea that Imani Perry, or any writer in this country, could pull off what she pulls off in Breathe. More than any book I’ve read in the last twenty years, Breathe boldly reminds us that artful intentionality is not nearly as important as artful effectiveness, and artful effectiveness is shaped by the love a writer has for her intended audience. Somehow, Perry manages to mourn, celebrate, theorize, and welcome us into the space between, and around, this Black mother and her Black sons. Though the language here is different from all of Perry’s other work, the attentiveness to sustained analysis is even more apparent. One feels that Perry had to write her other five books to write this one, the smallest and ironically the most rigorous, personal, and soulful of all of her genius work. Breathe is the first book I’ve ever needed to read out loud with my mother.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: Am American Memoir “In Breathe, Perry offers a lyrical meditation that connects a painful, proud history of African American struggle with a clarion call for present-day action to protect, defend, and celebrate the promise of the next generation.” —Stacey Abrams, founder and chair of Fair Fight Action, Inc. “Breathe is at once a resplendent meditation on the labor and art of parenting and on the ‘special calling’ of mothering Black boys in America. By turns fierce and loving, intimate and erudite, and drawing with deep complexity on her Catholic theology and spirituality, Imani Perry interweaves the most universal of dreams and desires with the particular traumas of our world of ‘wild-eyed’ whiteness. In so doing she offers her sons—and all the rest of us, and our sons and daughters—a vision of human resilience and wholeness that could reframe and redeem this young century&