How to carry water Selected poems of Lucille Clifton

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. (Sept.)

water sign woman the woman who feels everything sits in her new house waiting for someone to come who knows how to carry water without spilling, who knows why the desert is sprinkled with salt, why tomorrow is such a long and ominous word. they say to the feel things woman that little she dreams is possible, that there is only so much joy to go around, only so much water. there are no questions for this, no arguments. she has to forget to remember the edge of the sea, they say, to forget how to swim to the edge, she has to forget how to feel. the woman who feels everything sits in her new house retaining the secret the desert knew when it walked up from the ocean, the desert, so beautiful in her eyes; water will come again if you can wait for it. she feels what the desert feels. she waits. Excerpted from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton by Lucille Clifton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.