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Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of “crisis ordinary” in its analysis of Black British poets publishing after 2008, this essay argues that this new cohort of writers often draws upon the representational techniques of their 1970s and 1980s forebears to subtend stereotypes of Black British life that view it as a state of constant crisis. In the work of Momtaza Mehri, Warsan Shire, and Caleb Femi, the essay reads efforts to simultaneously exalt the signs and symbols of a city-based and eclectic Black British working class alongside efforts to name and assign blame for the challenges of contemporary Black British life. In the work of Roger Robinson and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, however, the essay argues that an attendant, emergent trend is present that breaks away from the techniques of previous generations: a poetics that seeks to transcend all imposed limits in the service of novel readings of Black being and its relationship to the world.