Description:
Plainspoken, empowering, spare, wise beyond measure, Clifton's words are a balm and a force of good for all: "The surest failure / is the unattempted walk."
Review Quotes:
Praise for Lucille Clifton:
"Lucille is a master of the epigram. Many of her best-loved poems . . . pack more emotional resonance into fewer lines than many novels achieve in hundreds of pages." --Harper's Bazaar
"[Clifton] had an eye on the past, disrupting traditional tellings of American history to re-center the strength and creativity of Black women. . . . Clifton's work was marked by her indelible style. She wrote short poems in entirely lowercase letters decades before it was a fad. Her sentences are economical; her punctuation thunders."--The Daily Californian
"Clifton brings a complexity to something we imagined we understood -- and a relentless honesty."--The New York Times
"Lucille Clifton's poetry, legendary for its sparseness of word and punctuation, spoke unflinchingly of personal hardship, the history of oppression and the human condition." --BillMoyers.com
Praise for Tracy K. Smith:
"Tracy K. Smith, former poet laureate, has a wonderful way with strange and haunting images that still manage to tell a resonant story." --Kwame Dawes, The Oregonian