Adopting a genre- and medium-theoretical approach to three 21st-century play texts by Black women writers from Britain and the United States, this chapter considers their generic crossings between poetry and drama as a form of experimental playwriting. It demonstrates how debbie tucker green in born bad (2003), Jackie Kay in The Lamplighter (2008), and Aleshea Harris in Is God Is (2017) employ the hybrid form of poetic drama to highlight the deeply traumatic experiences of their plays’ Black female protagonists. However, the specific forms their poetic drama take are markedly different: tucker green’s family drama lyricizes dramatic speech in order to address incest in a Black British family, Kay’s radio play uses poetical repetitions to dramatize the centuries-long suffering caused by the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, while Harris’s eclectic revenge tragedy Is God Is experiments with typography and mise en page to depict how twin sisters take revenge on their father for having mutilated them when they were younger. In each work, experimental crossings between poetry and drama serve to expand and replace conventionally realist modes of dramatic representation, enabling the authors to render their characters’ traumatization and simultaneously problematize the (im)possibility of representing trauma on stage. Moreover, the interplay of verbal and visual modes implicates audiences into the structures of looking, listening and (not) speaking that these plays address, thus modelling poetic drama in a specifically ethical way.