Digging Beneath Bones

Digging Beneath Bones, teri elam's debut poetry collection, moves through the Inner Banks of North Carolina, through backroads to I¿20 West to Augusta, all the way to San Francisco streets, then back to Atlanta. These poems travel the long road of memory, lineage, rupture, and return. Through the voice of a Black Southern woman, they illuminate a body shaped by rites of passage, moving through the comfort and discomfort of relationships, family, truth, and self. The collection explores memory and the mind as idea, need, and loss, tracing how personal and ancestral histories carve identity. It offers a vivid portrait of caretakers, aunties, nieces, and Black boy joy, revealing the everyday rituals: music, television, myth, prayer, and the small altars of daily life that hold meaning across generations. At its core, Digging Beneath Bones is a daughter's love letter to her mother. Through a kaleidoscope of broken and brilliant fragments, elam shines light on the bits of beauty, ache, inheritance, and testimony. These poems invite readers to look beneath the surface, to witness the infinite shapes memory can take, and to consider how we hold what we come from.