Book picks similar to
An Ordinary Woman by Lucille Clifton


poetry
zo-y-p-6
authors-of-color
african-diaspora

At the Full and Change of the Moon


Dionne Brand - 1999
    It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola -- who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century. "[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." -- William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review; "A delicately structured, beautifully written novel infused with rare emotional clarity." -- Julie Wheelwright, The Independent (London); "Rich, elegiac, almost biblical in its rhythms . . . One of the essential works of our times." -- The Globe & Mail (Toronto)

Emergency Brake


Ruth Madievsky - 2016
    This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."- Matthew Dickman"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."- David St. John"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"- ZYZZYVA"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."- Columbia Journal"Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, 'Do it again! Do it again!'”- Harpur Palate

The Gift of Everything


Lang Leav - 2021
    In addition, this beautifully conceived clothbound anthology includes 35 new poems as well as original and arresting illustrations by the author.Lang’s evocative words of love, loss, and self-empowerment have inspired millions across the globe to seek their own voice through the healing power of poetry. A definite must-have collection for all lovers of poetry and prose.   The Gift of Everything will thrill and delight fans of Lang Leav as well as those yet to discover the enchanting world of one the most celebrated poets in modern history.

Torn Awake


Forrest Gander - 2001
    Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

Her Mother's Love


Sha Cole - 2013
    She is slowly trying to put her life back together, but now that her father was gone that left a huge void in her life; not to mention leaving her with her now abusive mother. At times; this made her depressed and feel as if she was alone, with no real family. The only other person she felt was really there for her besides her best friend and her family; was her dad's lawyer Bill Williams. For some reason he always went above and beyond for her. As her 18th birthday is approaching, her mother's behavior changes. This gives Shuntay hope, that maybe they can have the type of relationship she wants with her mother. Unforeseen events; has Shuntay leaning on her new boyfriend, but she's unsure of how much to tell him, not wanting to burden him with her problems. While getting closer to her new boyfriend and prom around the corner she spends less time worrying about her mother. Finally something she can get excited about; an evening with her boyfriend and her best friend. A few days before prom unexpected events that Shuntay never saw coming occurs, landing her in the hospital critically injured. As Shuntay lie in her hospital bed everyone is questioning why would someone hurt her? When a secret no one was prepared for was revealed leaving everyone shocked, but the real question was how will Shuntay handle this life changing information?

Man with the Blue Guitar


Wallace Stevens - 1937
    

100 Notes on Violence


Julie Carr - 2010
    The 2009 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Rae Armantrout, is Julie Carr's provocative 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE. Carr obsessively researches intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Whitman and Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs for answers. This book is a dream-document both of light and innocence babies and the urge to protect them and of giving in to a wrenching darkness, where despair lies in the very fact that no single factor is to blame."

The Stranger Manual


Catie Rosemurgy - 2009
    The poems follow an unlikely character named Miss Peach, an unpredictable, cartoonish shapeshifter, who emerges onto the page dragging the myth of the individual, various gender scripts, and the grand tradition of the poetic persona along with her. She becomes an outsider, a hero, an intruder, a rock star. The town around her, Gold River, is also always in flux—part center and part mirage. The Stranger Manual celebrates the fractious nature of self and society in poems that are fabulist, speculative, and alluring.

Miracle Fruit


Aimee Nezhukumatathil - 2003
    As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

The Glimmering Room


Cynthia Cruz - 2012
    Peopled with "ambassadors from the Netherworld"--the orphaned and abused, the lost and addicted--Cruz leads us through this "traveling minstrel show / Called girlhood--" which is at once tragic and magical.

Roots and Branches: Poetry


Robert Duncan - 1969
    The poet has said of himself and his work: "I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters––Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov."

Things Are Happening


Joshua Beckman - 1998
    The inaugural winner of the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.

Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary


Harryette Mullen - 2013
    . . No voice in contemporary poetry is quite as original, cosmopolitan, witty, and tragic.” —Susan Stewart, citation for the Academy of American Poets FellowshipUrban tumbleweed, some people call it,discarded plastic bag we see in every cityblown down the street with vagrant wind.            —from Urban TumbleweedUrban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen’s exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen’s stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being’s place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, “What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk’ in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?”

Darling: New & Selected Poems


Jackie Kay - 2007
    'Darling' brings together many favourite poems from Kay's four collections, 'The Adoption Papers, 'Other Lovers', 'Off Colour' and 'Life Mask', as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers.

The Little Edges


Fred Moten - 2014
    Shaped prose is a form that works the "little edges" of lyric and discourse, and radiates out into the space between them. As occasional pieces, many of the poems in the book are the result of a request or commission to comment upon a work of art, or to memorialize a particular moment or person. In Moten's poems, the matter and energy of a singular event or person are transformed by their entrance into the social space that they, in turn, transform. An online reader's companion is available at http: //fredmoten.site.wesleyan.edu.