https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418786303 Qualitative Inquiry 2019, Vol. 25(9-10) 839–850 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1077800418786303 journals.sagepub.com/home/qix Article I prefer to make the claim that the poet is a human scientist. Where many human science researchers focus on research questions and methods, conclusions and implications, as a poet I am often more intrigued with how language works to open up possibilities for constructing understanding. —Carl Leggo (2004, p. 30) For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. —Audre Lorde (1984, p. 37) Research is “formailized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose” (Hurston, 1942/1996, p. 143). This article percolates from the curiosities of two poets and qualitative researchers of education, bound by a shared love of lan- guage and a shared interest in qualitative inquiry that cen- ters and celebrates Black girls and women. We describe ourselves as Black feminist poets who conduct research using feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar, 2007), thus revealing our political investments in and methodolog- ical approaches to probing how Black girls and women experience the connections among language, power, ideology, and social identity. Underpinning this article is the following question: How might using poetry in critical qualitative research—and particularly, in feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA)—“open possibilities for [de- and re-] constructing understanding” (Leggo, 2004, p. 30) of the complex lives, lived experiences, and knowledges of Black girls and women? Ideology and racial identity are intertwined for prolific poet June Jordan (2003), who declares, “I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black” (p. 269). As Black feminists, our affection for poetry is premised upon the idea that this narrative form is, as Jordan declares, “a political act” (Quiroz-Martinez, 1998, para. 2) that leverages language. This anchors our poking and prying at the methodological dimensions of feminist CDA. Connecting feminism and 786303QIX XX X 10.1177/1077800418786303Qualitative InquiryOhito and Nyachae research-article 2018 1 Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA 2 The State University of New York - Buffalo State, Buffalo, NY, USA Corresponding Author: Esther O. Ohito, Department of Black Studies & Department of Education, Denison University, 100 West College Street, Granville, OH 43023, USA. Email: ohitoe@denison.edu Poetically Poking at Language and Power: Using Black Feminist Poetry to Conduct Rigorous Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis Esther O. Ohito 1 and Tiffany M. Nyachae 2 Abstract Entanglements of power, language, identities, and ideologies perturb Black feminist poets and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) scholars alike. Here, we detail our use of Black feminist poetry to address concerns with rigor in CDA. We marry Black feminist theorizing about language to feminist CDA to illuminate how—for qualitative data analysis—poetry can foster rigor. Poetry also illuminates the suitability of feminist CDA for the Black feminist project of unveiling Black women’s discursive subjugation. Through poetry, we deconstruct and reconstruct initial analysis of data, then construct new analyses from emerging insights. Black feminist poetry provided a pathway for us to demonstrate rigor by (a) engendering precise identification, distilling, and conveying of evidence substantiating findings; (b) enriching researcher triangulation by prompting deepened dialogue—about and with data—to occur for coresearchers; and (c) stimulating reflexivity. We conclude with questions useful for leveraging Black feminist poetry for rigorous, expressly political critical qualitative inquiry. Keywords feminist studies, Afrocentric feminist methodologies, investigative poetry, discourse, qualitative research & education