In Beautiful Ashe, Tai Amri wrestles with the complexities of softness, tenderness, Spirit, and home within the confines of identities and legacies of historical oppressions. Ashe,  a Yoruba concept symbolizing the spiritual essence of a being and its ability to vision and create a new world, is present in Tai Amri's work and builds throughout the manuscript visually, structurally, and in its orality mimicking not only the tonal languages of Southwestern Africa but the polyvalent meanings and concept maps. Beautiful Ashe is a masterful work and speaks to the intersectionalities of being a Spirit Worker in our modern landscape.

-- Lou Florez, Awo Ifadunsin

Tai Amri is an unapologetic storyteller. He shares his thoughts and experiences of growth, community, love, spirituality, relationships, and everything in between for the world to read all the while challenging this settler colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy society that has and continues to marginalize and oppress us Black, Indigenous, and people of color. His poems contain powerful truths and raw emotion even punch lines that resonate and leave you reading out loud to yourself in the mirror or as if you were at a poetry slam. 

-- Sierra Two Bulls, Urban Site Coordinator, Kansas Serves Native American Families

Beautiful Ashe moves like an incisive, complicated traveler crossing borders of race, nations, continents, and time. Along the way the ugliest, most blood-drenched realities of Black and Indigenous history find succor and release in emotive, supernatural songs of the spirit. And once this journey reaches its ending, our souls have been singed, opened, and ultimately loved by the words of a sweet black boy.

-- Darren Canady, KU Professor, Playwright, Brothers of the Dust

Beautiful Ashe. Beautiful Ashe. It's remarkable that a sweet black boy can still operate from a place of altruism and vulnerability after reading Beautiful Ashe: memoirs of a sweet black boy & other poems. These are the words of a seer, healer and warrior. I see you, Tai Amri Spann-Ryan. 

--Huascar Medina, Poet Laureate of Kansas, Author, Un Mango Grows in Kansas

Open the door of your home. Make contact with the earth. Read this book.  If it's not possible to leave the place where you live, then let this book be the door. Let this book be the ground.

-- Bhanu Kapil, TS Eliot Poetry Prize Winner, Author, How To Wash A Heart

Tai Amri paints pictures of time that isn't linear, but that is vivid, poignant, and heartbreakingly vibrant. The reality of our lives are complex, as is our hope, as is our collective and individual Truth.

In Courageous Awe,

-- Caleb, Community Organizer, BLM-LFK, IdentiFight

Tai Amri’s Words pour from the page with a blend of latent rage and poignant vulnerability.  He dances between the worlds of raw truth telling and hopeful futurism inviting the reader deeper into their own life, their own thoughts, their own longings.”

-- Rev Corbin Tobey-Davis, Executive Director of The ROCK Center

Beautiful Ashe is a Black testament of these tumultuous times. Tai's raw honesty comes woven into a tapestry of words born of blood rites and rescue missions. The majesty of his command of the culture, nuanced as our many varied selves, carries a wisdom that coils the ancient with the future. Beautiful Ashe is the necessary medicine we need now; a healing balm for these warring times.

-- Ewuare X. Osayande, Poet, Author, Black Phoenix Uprising

Tai Amri’s work is like a warm and comforting hug from one’s father. The presence and vulnerability of Tai’s paternal light shine in his work, making you feel not only seen, but protected and loved.  In Beautiful Ashe, Tai has a poetic storytelling that celebrates provocative truth telling and sweet wisdom.  One can admire the strength, that is black heritage, through Tai Amri’s eyes weaved in his memoir of Black Ashe.

-- Cia Cole, Creative, Musician, Model, Mom

This book makes me want to cry, and it makes me want to fight, and it makes me want to cuddle every baby I can get my hands on. It makes me grateful that a poet and prophet with such clear vision (not just visionary, but also in terms of seeing things for what they are) can speak in such an undistilled way. And it gives me hope because over and over it reminds me what the power of women can create and it reminds me that people across the gender spectrum can actually come together for real liberation--Black liberation and all our liberation. Here's hoping we will.

-- Sandhya Jha, Anti-Oppression/DEI Consultant, Author, Liberated Love

Tai Amri's poetry, passion, and perseverance feel like a force of nature that gently and fiercely exposes the truth of our human capacity to create both beauty and devastation. My heart breaks and is mended back together, hope is lost and regained, tears fall and smiles lift as he weaves together grief, despair, rage, and love. I am grateful for his tender embrace as he knocks down the once-comforting illusions.

-- Teri Lynn Grunthaner, Expressive Therapist & Mediator at Radical Heart Expressive Therapy

Tai Amri understands and loves the human family. He explored fairy gardens and played pirate with my daughter while we were in seminary. Now she’s a revolutionary. His beautiful words will inspire generations to radical love.

-- The Rev. Dr. Joyce Parry Moore

Tai Amri Spann-Ryan writes with fierce tenderness about striving to unmask and be real in the face of multiple oppressions. His searing lines cut through the pain of enclosures both literal and cultural, to reclaim and celebrate the sweetness that is his birthright. He grounds in wisdom and lyrically pierces to the heart of the matter. His poems read like incantations of loving truth and a willingness to call out delusion. In beautiful ashe he calls forth his ancestors’ wisdom and nourishment and conjures healing spells and prayers for his children and descendants. Read Tai Amri’s verses and feel the incandescence he transmits: these poems are wholly holy.

-- Lucy Duncan, Director of Friends Relationships AFSC

Tai speaks with the wisdom of the ancestors, the knowledge of the elders, the energy of youth, and the gratefulness of our future born. In one word Tai Amri is timeless.

-- Ashanti Spears, Co-Founder B.L.A.C.K. Lawrence