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Book Description From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for "encompassing...every feeling and experience a woman has ever had," for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
from Horn Book reviews An African-American girl and her brother are attacked by a gang, who spray paint her face white and give her brother a black eye. Devastated, Helene-Angel refuses to leave the apartment. Her grandmother, who witnessed such treatment in the South, understands but tells her that she must go back into the world. Whitewash (library binding) - Ntozake Shange
Sassafrass weaves tapestries, Cypress dances, Indigo makes magnificent dolls and plays a wild violin. Their originality is ever-present; even the time-honored transition into womanhood provides Indigo with an opportunity for expression: "Indigo, I don't want to hear another word about it...'" her Mamma says, "I'm not setting the table with my Sunday china for fifteen dolls who got their period today.'" The novel gives a brief, but expressive glimpse of Indigo's future and then moves across the country with Sassafrass and Cypress as they, like Indigo, reinterpret, recreate, and challenge the predictable events of their evolving adult lives. Although some of the language might seem cliched these days, it should be remembered that this book was among the first modern creative experiments that combined tradition with innovation, spirituality with passion, and celebration with grief and fury to express African-American women's experiences in distinctive and explicit terms.
from New York Times The renowned playwright, author of for colored girls who have considered suicide, offers a lyrical coming-of-age novel, set in 1957 in St. Louis, about a teenaged black girl who endures the trials of school integration.
From Horn Book Shange's modern, rhythmic poem invoking the passion of music is juxtaposed with a diverse selection of collage and other media paintings by a renowned American artist. While the images were not created for the text (and vice versa), the match is appropriate and invokes active imagining. The poem is a real find for older readers not deterred by the picture-book format.
From Booklist , January 1, 1998 Perhaps best known for her play . . . for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1977), Shange in her new book interweaves recipes with memories in a generous banquet celebrating the cultural significance of certain foods. In recollecting places lived or visited, Shange questions the derivation and preparation of various comestibles, while observing the way traditions vary from state to state. Recalling impressions of countries such as Nicaragua, England, and Cuba, Shange paints a fervent, richly impassioned chronicle of African American experience, at the same time making note of political situations and discord among the peoples of these nations and recording how connections are made beyond issues of class or skin color. Recipes serve as savory, nourishing garnishes--at once enhancing and adding a qualified zest to Shange's potent commentaries.
From Booklist , September 1, 1994 Although nearly 10 years have gone by since Shange's last novel, Betsey Brown (1985), her distinctive narrative style and thematic focus haven't changed. Shange is still a more potent poet and playwright than novelist, so her new work of fiction is episodic, inlaid with lush and earthy images, and electric with to-the-beat dialogue that just begs for the give-and-take of a live performance. The novel has some flaws, but it has a strong presence and covers a lot of psychological and cultural territory. Liliane epitomizes Shange's ideal black woman--a profoundly sensual and artistic renegade haunted by the suffering of people of color and her lost loved ones. The daughter of an ambitious, domineering father and a beautiful, selfish mother, Liliane grew up politicized as well as deeply attuned to beauty, eroticism, and the sharp pleasure of living a self-directed life. Shange conducts a rough-and-ready little chorus of friends, cousins, and lovers to tell Liliane's complex and emblematic story.
The Love Space Demands - Ntozake Shange Songs of love and urban tragedy from one of the preeminent African-American writers of our time. Shange's poems express the need to be felt and heard, to be necessary. In this love space, we all wear our desires, t-cells, and hearts on our sleeves and experience all that comes with wanting to get hold of life, or someone to love.
Book Description In five autobiographical vignettes, Charlayne Woodard tells the moving tale of her African-American family through three generations of love, struggle and triumph. This NAACP award-winning play is a one-woman tour de force.
Four interwoven narrative lines explore issues of race and identity employing text that pushes the boundaries of language and dramatic metaphors that challenge conventional thinking.
Venus narrates the story of the Venus Hottentot, an young African woman taken to England and displayed in a carnival sideshow. She is rescued from the sideshow by a doctor who eventually loves and exploits her. Intercut with contemporary scenes of love, the play is also a mediation on love and lovers. Far from being a sweeping and simplistic condemnation of Colonialism, Venus explores the victim's complicity with the victimizer and examines the multiplicity of reasons why we behave as we do.
Parks brings a powerful African American female perspective to contemporary avant-garde theater--or perhaps it's the other way --> --around. This volume covers her career from its beginning in the mid-1980s up to 1994. All the works are audacious. Black history, black culture and the supernatural collide in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. In The America Play, a black man travels the U.S. reenacting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln over and over, as other characters try to extricate themselves from the giant pit of history (and to figure out how they got into it). This volume includes the euphoniously titled Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, Betting on the Dust Commander, Pickling, and Devotees in the Garden of Love. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities - Anna Deavere Smith Book Description Derived from interviews with a wide range of people who experienced or observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The Mirror is as distinguished a work of commentary on current Black-White tensions as it is a work of drama.
Book Description Anna Deavere Smith's stunning new work of "documentary theater" in which she uses verbatim the words of people who experienced the Los Angeles riots to expose and explore the devastating human impact of that event.
A Raisin in the Sun (hardcover) - Lorraine Hansberry Book Description When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."--The New York Times. A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window - Lorraine Hansberry Book Description By the time of her death thirty years ago, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Hansberry gave us an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling with his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice. These two plays remain milestones in the American theater, remarkable not only for their historical value but for their continued ability to engage the imagination and the heart.
Book Description Here are Lorraine Hansberry's last three plays--Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?--representing the capstone of her achievement. Includes a new preface by Jewell Gresham Nemiroff and a revised introduction by Margaret B. Wilkerson. Deadly Triplets: A Theatre Mystery and Journal - Adrienne Kennedy from Library Journal The first part of this work is a fine mystery novella based on Kennedy's experiences in London in the Sixties. Set in the theater world, it concerns confused identities and the author's own search for a clearer sense of self as she considers what she knows about her estranged (and possibly dead) mother. Most interesting is the interplay with the autobiographical form, a relationship made more obvious when the novel is considered in relation to the journal section. Here, Kennedy offers sketches of the theater, film, and music people she met and befriended during her London years. These sketches fortify the first section by suggesting its historical basis. Adrienne Kennedy in One Acts - Adrienne Kennedy Alexander Plays - Adrienne Kennedy from Library Journal The Alexander Plays consists of four pieces that are, like all of Kennedy's works, complex, intense, and experimental. They revolve loosely around a writer named Suzanne Alexander. In She Talks to Beethoven (previously published in Antaeus in 1991), Alexander has a discussion with Beethoven. In The Ohio State Murders , when asked why her works are so violent, Alexander tells a chilling story about the murder of one of her twin daughters. The Film Club (a monolog) and The Dramatic Circle (a radio play) concern Suzanne's anxiety while awaiting the release of her husband, who has been imprisoned in Ghana. Village Voice writer Alisa Solomon provides a perceptive foreword to the plays.
Publishers Weekly As the bittersweet recollections of a young black growing up in Ohio in the 1940s, aspiring to be a famous writer, this scrapbook suffers from its deliberately fragmented format. Kennedy, whose Funnyhouse of a Negro won a 1964 Obie Award, seems to be adapting here the nonlinear style of her avant-garde plays. Hundreds of very short, titled entries (``Junior High,'' ``My Father,'' ``Paul Robeson,'' ``Frank Sinatra'') add up to a jumbled self-portrait of a writer slowly finding her direction. She also presents a compendium of creative artists, famous people, friends and relatives who in any way influenced her work. We get scores of brief entries on Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Beethoven, Richard Wright, Jackson Pollock, Chopin, Duke Ellington, Socrates and dozens more. Readers with an abiding interest in Kennedy's dramatic output may find this encyclopedic approach worth the effort. Sleep Deprivation Chamber: A Theatre Piece - Adam P. Kennedy with Adrienne Kennedy
In a style that is hers alone, Sonia Sanchez brings politics and poetry together as she passionately relates scenes from the lives of poor blacks. "Sanchez is a remarkable writer . . . this is s book in which the whole adds up to far more than the parts."
from Publishers Weekly This gathering, including work from six previous collections, highlights Sanchez's range: prose poems investigate disenfranchised lives, from a lover strung out on dope to a hate-crime victim whose home has been spray-painted with the predictably horrifying epithets, while lyrics move down the page in sinewy lines that seem to pluck living speech from air. But it is love, or the lack therof, that is at the heart of the book. Sanchez's language is restless in seeking it out, shuttling back and forth from a gritty black vernacular in "Towhomitmayconcern" ("git yo/ self fattened up man/ you gon be doing battle with me/ ima gonna stake you out") to the jazzy nomenclature of "This Is not a Small Voice" ("This is the voice of La Tanya./ Kadesha. Shaniqua. This/ is the voice of Antoine./ Darryl. Shaquille.") Such polyvocal lyrics celebrate the breadth of black culture, and probe the silences of bigotry. Like June Jordan, Sanchez is at her best when enacting power struggles rather than merely rallying political support in easy battlecries, as some of these poems do. This collection should draw wide attention to the consistency of Sanchez's achievement, and to the success of her formal adaptations, like the recent "Blues Haikus": "am I yo philly/ outpost? man when you sail in/ to my house, you docked."
from Library Journal Mostly adapted from Japanese forms like haiku and tanka, with a few longer poems addressed in homage to the late rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur, Cornel West, and others, they fail to showcase three of this poet's most potent strengths: economical storytelling; the ability to cut through to the heart of things with sharp-edged, nonsentimental descriptions of pain; and a concise and affecting use of rhyme. Occasionally, however, they do exhibit her gift for humor: "I wuz in Kansas/ dorothy and toto wuznt/ a jacuzzi, sky, you." Does Your House Have Lions? (hardback) - Sonia Sanchez Does Your House Have Lions? (paperback) - Sonia Sanchez from Publishers Weekly Rich in kin and kindred spirits, this panegyrical collection displays Sanchez's gift for crafting public poetry out of social issues and familial relationships. Straightforwardly, Sanchez (Wounded in the House of a Friend) documents her brother's death from AIDS, and the family's estrangement and reconciliation. Calculated tensions are expertly enhanced in rhyme royal stanzas where words and linebreaks virtually tumble across the page. The energy generated by this formal compression mirrors her brother's struggle against the confines of society: "and the days rummaging his eyes/ and the nights flickering through a slit/ of narrow bars. hips. thighs./ and his thoughts labeling him misfit/ as he prowled, pranced in the starlit/ city...." As the sequence of poems progresses, ancestral voices are introduced and the composition gives way to African words and rhythms: "i come, doctor./ mangi nyo captor." The stanzas compress and collapse as the brother's health deteriorates, ending in forceful dialogues between, for example, "brother" and "ancestor, female." Sanchez successfully evokes her brother's journey toward self-realization: "come here African/ come here African/ i am coming/ i am coming." In the volume's four sections, Sanchez moves from her brother's youth in the South, to his life in New York, and to his eventual death. Building in drama and preacherly cadences, this work is fluid, controlled and dexterously paced. Under a Soprano Sky - Sonia Sanchez from Choice The surrealistic image in the title of this latest collection of new and selected poems by Sonia Sanchez suggests the womanist concerns around which these poems (like all of her writings produced during the last 20 years) revolve. The many haiku, narrative, and elegies in this collection contain Sanchez's own brand of Afro-American lyricism, and range in tone from anger, to cynicism, to reverence. The subjects range from autobiography (``Dear Mama,'' and ``Towhomitmayconcern'') to social commentary (``Philadelphia: Spring, 1985,'' and ``Morning Raga: 6/28/84''), from motherhood to South Africa. All of the poems reflect Sanchez's concern with expanding the contours of the English language to facilitate her self-expression as a black woman. The collection also reflects her interest in the words and images of Third World artists. She incorporates Bob Marley, Pablo Neruda, and Nicholas Guillen into her own worldview by using excerpts from their poems as epigraphs to five sections of this collection. Two poems are a tribute to Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan novelist. Some of the more cryptic poems (e.g., ``Fragment #2'') do elude the reader, but most leave a strong impression of Sanchez as a chronicler of her time and period. Wounded in the House of a Friend (hardback) - Sonia Sanchez Wounded in the House of a Friend (paperback) - Sonia Sanchez from Publishers Weekly Sanchez (Under a Soprano Sky), along with Nikki Giovanni, was a major player in the early 1970s as African American women began to explore feminist, political and cultural issues in poetry. Focusing on performance as an integral aspect of craft, Sanchez prepared the way for such writers as Ntozake Shange. Much of this book (her first in eight years) pays back debts; in a mixture of poetry and prose, she commemorates a quarter century of Essence magazine and offers memorial pieces for James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Sanchez is at her best, however, when she places her speaker in the furious center of criminal action: a raped woman's detailed account of her attack, a woman trading her seven-year-old daughter for crack (``he held the stuff out/ to me and i cdn't remember/ her birthdate i cdn't remember/ my daughter's face''). A brilliant narrative is offered in the voice of a Harlem woman struggling with (and eventually hammered to death by) her junkie granddaughter. Living at the Epicenter (Morse Poetry Prize) - Sonia Sanchez, Allison Funk
from Library Journal This magnificent and totally original book highlights the emotional battles that blacks will recognize from their own lives in a racist society. As she offers glimpses in her stories of her personal experiences, like her family's migration from south to north, she sends the message that unless you have self-knowledge others can make you become what they desire you to be. She also reminds us that a person without a past is a person without an identity. The richness of this black writer's prose weaves a delicate thread throughout this appealing collection, which will acquaint its readers not only with life's everyday dilemmas but with distinct experiences within the black community itself.
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (hardback) - Pearl Cleage What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (audiobook) - Pearl Cleage from The Kirkus Review It takes talent to make a love story between an AIDS victim and a convicted murderer work, but playwright/essayist Cleage (Deals with the Devil, 1993, etc.) more than meets the challenge in this gutsy, very likable fiction debut. As a teenager, Ava Johnson couldn't wait to move away from tiny Idlewild, Michigan, a lakefront village originally conceived- -and enjoyed for decades--as a resort town for people of color. Now just a half-abandoned dot on the map like any other (except that most of the residents are still black), Idlewild offers the only safe haven when Ava, now nearly 30, learns she's contracted the HIV virus and is forced to close down her hair salon in Atlanta. Telling herself she's just visiting her older sister, Joyce, for a few weeks before she moves on to San Francisco, sophisticated Ava (whose voice is always feisty and humorous, even when the subject is death) is nevertheless impressed by bighearted Joyce's efforts to help the teenaged girls in her small community. She's also intrigued by handsome, sexily ``together'' Eddie Jefferson, a once- wild childhood acquaintance who's returned to Idlewild to raise vegetables, grow dreadlocks, and practice t'ai. While giving support to Joyce as she fights her conservative church for the right to teach birth to adolescents, and assisting (a bit skeptically) when Joyce takes in an addict's abandoned baby, Ava finds herself falling hard for sensitive, nurturing Eddie. Obviously, he's interested, too--but won't he run once he learns she's carrying the virus? Ava hardly dares hope for a final chance at love, even when Eddie reveals his own terrible--and, finally, forgivable--past. Lively, topical, and fantasy-filled. Watch out, Terry McMillan. Cleage is on your tail. Flyin' West and Other Plays - Pearl Cleage Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery - Shay Youngblood
Book Description From a writer whose work The Washington Post has acclaimed as "intelligent and erotic . . . immensely engrossing and satisfying," the story of an African-American writer's artistic awakening. Shay Youngblood's debut novel, Soul Kiss, received accolades from reviewers and writers alike. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution hailed it as "exquisite" while Tina McElroy Ansa called it "extraordinary . . . lyrical, intimate, funny, unsettling, enthralling." Now, in her second novel, Youngblood explores the endeavor of a creative coming-of-age, and infuses her story with the same mesmerizing, lush language and impressionistic style of her first remarkable work. Black Girl in Paris wends its way around the mythology of Paris as a legendary hothouse for African-American artists. Like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, and Billie Holiday, Youngblood's heroine leaves the American South nurturing a dream of finding artistic emancipation in the City of Light. She experiments freely, inhabiting different incarnations--artist's model, poet's helper, au pair, teacher, thief, and lover--to keep body and soul together, to heal the wounds of her broken family and broken heart, to discover her sexual self, and to wrestle her dreams of becoming a writer into reality. Youngblood's natural lyricism, as effortless as an inspired improvisation, and her respect for the tradition she depicts create a natural tension between old and new, reverence and innovation, and mark this novel as a worthy successor to her much-praised debut.
Soul Kiss (hardback) - Shay Youngblood Amazon.com review Soul Kiss, an eloquent first novel from well-known African-American playwright Shay Youngblood, opens as seven-year-old Mariah Kim Santos is unceremoniously and suddenly deposited by her mother to live with two maiden aunts in rural Georgia. The only parting words from Mama are "Mama loves you." Mariah is then directed to wait for her mother's return. Years pass and Mariah's mother doesn't come back. Mariah forms a unique and loving relationship with her surrogate parents. As she passes into womanhood, Mariah feels emotionally complete only with other women; when she learns for the first time about the existence of her father, the central questions of her familial and sexual identities rise, and she seeks out that father, a painter living in Los Angeles. There she makes the disorienting simultaneous discovery of new areas of explosive erotic passion and family love. Big Mama Stories - Shay Youngblood from 500 Great Books by Women The narrator of The Big Mama Stories grew up in "the projects," an area with "lines that marked us" and where the best blackberries flourished in the black cemetery. When her biological mother deserted her at five, the narrator was left with Big Mama, who was neither big nor her mother: "Just regular. A old Black woman who had a gift for seeing with her heart." Big Mama, however, is only one of this young girl's mothers - and they're not all female. Through their interconnected stories we learn their histories and hear their advice. From Big Mama, an explanation about why she uses snuff becomes a lesson on Black pride. From Miss Corrine, the hairdresser, the narrator learns the truth about her mother along with some advice: "if you got to dance or dream or anything at all, take it a step at a time and don't let nothing and nobody get in your way when you doing right." There's Miss Tom "who was not a pretty woman, she was handsome like a man" and Uncle Buck who tells her "Sometimes I love Jesus and sometimes I think he hard of hearing." On occasion all the mothers come together, to heal an illness or to celebrate a rite of passage, and during these events the narrative soars. Whether quiet or jubilant, sad or defiant or thoughtful, each story has power and pride, given freely to the narrator, and through her, to us. Before It Hits Home - Cheryl L. West A play about a bisexual jazz musician who returns home when he discovers he has AIDS.
A Hero Ain't Nothing but a Sandwich (hardback 1993) - Alice Childress A Hero Ain't Nothing but a Sandwich - (1975 edition) - Alice Childress Amazon.com Review Dope. Smack. Junk. Heroin. No matter what you call it, you can't change the fact that 13-year-old Benjie is on it. Oh no ... he's not hooked, though. He could stop anytime ... really. But why is a young kid like Benjie using at all? Originally published in 1973, Alice Childress's novel remains one of the most profound explorations of an addict's world ever written. What makes this novel different is that Childress points no fingers and offers no easy answers. Her characters' moods and motivations are complex, fresh, unexpected, and courageously real. Woven into Benjie's own ramblings about his situation are the thoughts of those involved by association--his mother, stepfather, friends, the pusher, and teachers at his school. This narrative technique creates a rich, heroic portrait of the social and psychological circumstances of addiction, love, and family. Mojo and String: Two Plays - Alice Childress
Rainbow Jordan (hardback) - Alice Childress Amazon.com Synopsis Her mother, her foster guardian, and 14-year-old Rainbow comment on the state of things as she prepares to return to a foster home for yet another stay. Those Other People - Alice Childress from Publishers Weekly Rather than begin college, Jonathan, 17, becomes a high school computer instructor, hoping to avoid facing his homosexuality or thinking about his problems. But he is resented by teacher Rex Hardy, who disrupts Jonathan's classes, as does Spencer, a poisonous youth who hates the school's new (and only) black students, Tyrone and Susan Tate. Then Hardy assaults Theodora, Tyrone's computer-lab partner. Theo is determined to press charges for attempted rape with Jonathan and Tyrone as her only witnesses, and Susan in possession of crucial evidence. Jonathan is caught up in a maelstrom of malicious gossip, threatening phone calls and pressure from the school board, but at last must act for himself. The Yellow House on the Corner - Rita Dove
The poems in this unusual book tell a story, forming a narrative almost like a realistic novel. Read in sequence as intended, they tell of the lives of a married black couple (not unlike Dove's own grandparents) from the early part of the century until their deaths in the 1960s, a period that spans the great migration of blacks from rural south to urban north. But this is merely the social backdrop to the story of a marriage. Two separate sequences offer two views of the couple's lives: the first, "Mandolin," consists of 23 poems giving Thomas's side, and "Canary in Bloom" gives Beulah's in 21 poems. Together they paint a detailed, poetically dense portrait of two lives in all their frailty, dignity and complexity. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (1987) occasionally gives her gift free rein in this somewhat mechanically rendered first novel- -about a young artistic black woman and her search for self. Virginia King returns to Akron, her hometown, as an artist-in- the-schools. Her interest in classical cello has become little more than a hobby since the end of her affair with a fellow cellist; her studies of drama and mime led to a dead end because Nixon-era America had no work for a serious black actress; and the experimental puppetry troupe she worked and lived with has gone under. But now, at Washington Elementary School, everything seems at first to go her way: she all but effortlessly captivates the children, as well as a gorgeous man who wears great-smelling cologne and helps heal past disappointment. For drama, there's the revelation of a family secret, the conflict between marriage and career, and an accident to a child. In between, Virginia visits her wise grandmother, delivers essaylike disquisitions on the history and psychology of puppetry, and has serious thoughts about the cello's classical repertoire. In these sections-- even the didactic ones-- the author seems to care about her subject and her own words. Perhaps adherence to conventional structure and development hindered Dove's vision: the telling of Virginia's personal story often seems driven more by obligation than inspiration. Virginia worth knowing, but she's not alive enough on the page to be of interest for herself instead of just for her situation. -- Copyright )1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Selected
Poems - Rita Dove
Brought together for the first time in one volume are the astonishing poems of the nation's new Poet Laureate--the youngest poet so named, as well as the first African-American chosen for the position. Contains The Yellow House on the Corner, Museum, and Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Calling upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Mother Love examines the love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter, each daughter a potential mother. The Poet's World (special order) - Rita Dove
If you find memoirs more immediate than contemporary poetry, novels more compelling, history more vivid, then you haven't read Rita Dove. A former poet laureate of the United States, Dove is at the height of her powers in On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Her range is extraordinary. The opening "Cameos" sequence reads like a compressed colloquial epic of one hard-up but lively family-- Lucille with her "bright and bitter" eyes, her wandering husband, Joe, their bookish son and seven daughters ("their / names fantastic, myriad / as the points of a chandelier"). There are magnificent occasional pieces--"Incarnation in Phoenix" on breastfeeding a newborn ("I'm not ready for this motherhood stuff"); "Against Self-Pity" ("pure misery a luxury /one never learns to enjoy"); "The First Book" ("Dig in: / You'll never reach bottom"). "Rosa," the centerpiece of the title sequence, reads almost like haiku as Dove captures Rosa Parks's historic act of refusal in 12 taut lines. And then there are poems that stand alone for their unique electrifying strangeness: "The Venus of Willendorf," in which Dove ponders the ancient sacred mystery of man's worship of the female body, and "Lady Freedom Among Us," in which Freedom is incarnated as a bag lady--"she who has brought mercy back into the streets / and will not retire politely to the potter's field." Of the many notes that Dove hits in this volume, the most welcome is pure unadulterated delight, as in "Dawn Revisited": "Imagine you wake up / with a second chance..." Imagine: Dove has done the hard part. All we have to do is open this splendid volume, sit back, and enjoy the ride. --David Laskin
Contains poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, and others, including little known poets such as Mae V. Cowdery.
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