Sweetgrass and Soul Food

In Sweetgrass and Soul Food: A Memoir in Poems, Marique B. Moss invites us into a world shaped by memory, survival, and the honest mess of becoming. This debut collection is a poetic memoir, tender, sharp, emotionally rich, and sometimes laugh out loud funny. It does not separate joy from pain or culture from conflict. Instead, it holds them all at once.
Moss writes from the layered reality of being both Black and Native, where survival is a language and memory is medicine. The poems in this collection speak with a voice that has known both erasure and power, both silence and the urgency to break it. She recalls moments of hyperventilating outside of Lids, hotboxing with the ancestors in her room when the world got too loud, crash landings at mountain airports, and city nights steeped in grief, love, and survival.
Whether she is sipping peppermint mochas while navigating anxiety or speaking up in rooms that never expected her voice, these poems act as both shield and offering, for those still learning how to stay, feel, and rise.
This is a book about being seen.
About not shrinking.
About remembering who you are, even when no one gets your name right.
It is about sweetgrass.
It is about soul food.
It is about coming home to yourself.