Book picks similar to
Voices by Lucille Clifton


poetry
african-american
fiction-and-poetry
authors-of-color

The Bad Wife Handbook


Rachel Zucker - 2007
    Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

Where a Nickel Costs a Dime


Willie Perdomo - 1996
    They throw us off rooftops and say we slipped. They shoot my father and say he was crazy. They put a bullet in my head and say they found me that way."Blending images of street life, drugs, and AIDS against hope and determination, Willie Perdomo is a cutting-edge bard who speaks to the soul of his generation.

Even This Page Is White


Vivek Shraya - 2016
    Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible, and undeniable.

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry


John Murillo - 2020
    A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father’s fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker “to become something unbreakable.” The presence of these and poetic forbears—Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa—provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice.

Indigo


Ellen Bass - 2020
    Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife's return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own "succulent skin," the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents' lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty


Dorothy Roberts - 1997
    This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of  the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives.   It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new , and socially transformative, definition of  "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.The author is able to combine the most innovative and radical thinking on several fronts--racial theory, feminist, and legal--to produce a work that is at once history and political treatise.  By using the history of how American law--beginning with slavery--has treated the issue of the state's right  to interfere with the black woman's body, the author explosively and effectively makes the case for the legal redress to the racist implications of current policy with regards to 1) access to and coercive dispensing of birth control to poor black women 2) the criminalization of parenting by poor black women who have used drugs 3) the stigmatization and devaluation of poor black mothers under the new welfare provisions, and 4) the differential access to and disproportionate spending of social resources on the new reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples to insure genetically related offspring.The legal redress of the racism inherent in current  American law and policy in these matters, the author argues in her last chapter, demands and should lead us to adopt a new standard and definition of the liberal theory of "liberty" and "equality" based on the need for, and the positive role of government in fostering, social as well as individual justice.

Black Girls Rock!: Celebrating the Power, Beauty, and Brilliance of Black Women


Beverly Bond - 2017
    Henson, Erykah Badu, and more!Discover the beautiful complexity, rich cultural traditions, and bountiful contributions of some of today’s most powerful black women with this one-of-a-kind celebration of their diversity, power, fortitude, spirituality, and tenacity! Packed with anecdotes, affirmations, and inspirational essays from women of diverse backgrounds, Black Girls Rock! will empower and inspire you to be your best self.This beautiful compendium of black women’s voices and experiences includes inspirational poetry, exclusive interviews, and powerful and beautiful photographs celebrating black womanhood, and features the most dynamic trailblazers, celebrities, and influencers of our time. Contributors include Kerry Washington, Rebecca Walker, Tracee Ellis Ross, Regina King, Taraji P. Henson, Erykah Badu, Gabrielle Union, Misty Copeland, Jill Scott, Angela Davis, MC Lyte, Janelle Monae, Iyanla Vanzant, Queen Latifah, Mara Brock Akil, Ava Duvernay, Naomi Campbell, Dr. Helene D. Gayle, Bethann Hardison, Susan Taylor, Michaela Angela Davis, Melissa Harris-Perry, Shola Lynch, Tamron Hall, Nadia Lopez, Letitia James, Tai Beauchamp, Imani Perry, and Donna Byrd.

Ghost Machine


Ben Mirov - 2010
    This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.

Soft Targets


Deborah Landau - 2019
    In this ambitious lyric sequence, the speaker’s fear of annihilation expands beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which all inhabitants are “soft targets.” Her melancholic examinations recall life’s uncanny ability to transform ordinary places―subways, cafes, street corners―into sites of intense significance that weigh heavily on the modern mind.“O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon/enough what’s the rush,” Landau writes, contemplating a world beset by political tumult, random violence, terror attacks, and climate change. Still there are the ordinary and abundant pleasures of day-to-day living, though the tender exchanges of friendship and love play out against a backdrop of 21st century threats with historical echoes, as neo-Nazis marching in the United States recall her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany.

Resurrecting Mingus


Jenoyne Adams - 2001
    In this stunning debut novel, Jenoyne Adams, a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices Fellow, displays a rare talent for a first-time author: the skill and courage to write about some of the most controversial issues today in an absorbing and compulsively readable manner. Mingus Browning is a successful, young, beautiful lawyer whose life is falling apart. After a thirty-five-year marriage, Mingus's African-American father has suddenly left her Irish mother for a black woman. A daddy's girl, Mingus is torn between the father she has always been closer to, the mother she may have to defend in divorce proceedings, and a sister hell-bent on winning their lifelong sibling rivalry. Mingus is caught in middle of the three, a woman alone, and, in turn, realizes that she has probably always felt more comfortable that way because she is part of no one group, let alone a united family. Juggling her parents' grief with her own proves to be too much for Mingus as she stumbles from one questionable relationship to another, further complicating her life.After years of isolating herself from those who have tried to care for her, Mingus finally meets someone who rips through her protective defenses and exposes her need to be loved. Eric Simms, a smooth-talking television producer, is through playing dating games and is looking for love for real this time. With Eric, Mingus finally learns to forget the fear of a broken heart and opens herself completely. That is, until word starts circulating that her new love has his secrets as well, and suddenly what was a perfect relationship begins to look like yet another minefield of hurt, as Mingus is forced to choose between her man, her sister, and the truth.After facing a long, sad string of heartaches and betrayals, Mingus finally reaches the point in her life where she realizes who she is, what she wants, and how she doesn't need another man to get it. Marked by raw images and poetic prose, Jenoyne Adams's affecting first novel candidly explores the bonds of family, faith, and finding someone to love when you can't even find someone to trust.

And Short the Season


Maxine Kumin - 2014
    In And Short the Season she muses on mortality: her own and that of the earth. Always deeply personal, always political, these poems blend myth and modernity, fecundity and death, and the violence and tenderness of humankind.

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman


Michele Wallace - 1978
    She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power and the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. In 1990 the author added a new introduction examining the debate the book had sparked between intellectuals and political leaders; an extensive bibliography of contemporary black feminist studies was also added. Black Macho raised issues and arguments that framed the terms of current feminist and black theory and continues to be relevant today.

Time


Etel Adnan - 2019
    Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.

Oculus: Poems


Sally Wen Mao - 2019
    The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.

The Age of Phillis


Honorée Fanonne Jeffers - 2020
    Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley's "age"--the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley's relationship to black people and their individual "mercies" is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.