How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been published.
These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The life work of Clifton (1936 2010) forms an incandescent prayer for self-determination in this vital selected volume featuring 10 previously uncollected poems. Keenly edited and with a foreword by Girmay, the collection is a love letter to Black womanhood and motherhood, a historical record of violence and injustice against Black lives, and a reckoning with illness and abuse. Additionally, Girmay acknowledges a generation raised by "Ms. Lucille" and honors what Clifton saw as "a lineage of possibility." As always, Clifton guides the reader with her characteristic wit, repetition, and rage "i am i am i am furious" her unadorned lines and complex, shifting metaphors (which Girmay aptly describes as a "strange, triple-eyed imagery"). In these poems, versions of Clifton past and future, third and first-person, are on a quest toward understanding selfhood. "i am lucille," she writes, "which stands for light." That light refracts through the book as an insistence on survival, contemplation of the political, and delight in the ordinary. Clifton's poems are profound and powerful to behold.
