In African American poetry, grief work often involves confronting historical violence, family separation, racial injustice, inherited trauma, or communal bereavement. Poetry becomes a space not simply for expressing sorrow but for actively processing it, shaping meaning from pain, and preserving memory. The term helps explain works where mourning is ongoing labour rather than completed emotion, especially where historical wounds remain socially unresolved.

Grief work in African American poetry is shaped by the specific historical conditions of Black mourning: the impossibility of mourning enslaved people who left no official records, the repeated traumatic losses produced by racial violence, and the social prohibition against Black expressions of grief in public spaces. Students should engage with the concept of "disenfranchised grief" — grief that is not socially recognised or validated — as a framework for understanding why African American poets return obsessively to practices of naming, memorialising, and lamenting. Related terms include elegy of injustice, community lament, mourning ritual, bearing witness, and intergenerational trauma. Lucille Clifton and Natasha Trethewey are exemplary poets of grief work, finding formal structures adequate to losses that resist conventional elegiac resolution.