Poetry Winner, 2025 International Firebird Book Awards

Former poet laureate of Belfast, Maine, Afrofuturist/Oro-shamanic poet and bass clarinetist Toussaint St. Negritude dazzles with this debut collection of poems, featuring an ensemble of cosmic tones the late Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks once called "full of sweet sounds and surprises."

Through the inspiration of life, jazz, and nature, Mountain Spells is about the intrinsic clarity of emancipation, expressing all found intersections of what the author sees and experiences, and how this Black/queer/high-hat-wearing artist envisions the world through the lens of spirituality, the African diaspora, and nature as his home. Each poem, written in Vermont, expresses the whole cosmos of collective liberation.

"I listened to the birds, to the sky, what the leaves were telling me," says St. Negritude, and captured it all in improvisational, freeform, and musical poetry, lovely and changing as the seasons themselves.