Synopses & Reviews
Edited with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates famous poems and shines light on lesser-known poems by poet -- and national treasure -- Lucille Clifton (1936-2010).
Lucille Clifton's poetry defined strength through adversity focusing particularly on African-American experience and family life. Clifton's poems were widely celebrated during her lifetime, and she received wide acclaim for her work including the National Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems continue to inspire a new generation of readers and writers in the 21st century.
In How to Carry Water, formidable younger poet Aracelis Girmay (winner of the Whiting Award, GLCA Award, and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) introduces a selection of Clifton's work that is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today's tumultuous social and political moment.
Review
"Clifton was one of America's great poets, whose work throughout her lifetime was committed to chronicling and celebrating black lives. The honesty, joy, wisdom, and hope she brought to this task is regenerative." Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate
Review
"Open up to any page and Clifton delivers a word. Whether the subject is roaches, family, death, or surviving, she has a psalm for all occasions. She can create the most complicated magic out of the simplest words." Danez Smith, The Week
Review
"Clifton's earliest poems could have been written yesterday, and her later works could have been written decades ago. Each poem is always its own world. Her poems touch on the political, the personal, the spiritual." Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times
Synopsis
Selected poems from celebrated poet Lucille Clifton's 50-year career selected by Whiting Award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay.
Synopsis
Edited with a Foreword
by Aracelis Girmay
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 collected. 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.
About the Author
Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was an award winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children's books. Her poetry collection, Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA, 2000), won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1988 she became the only author to have two collections selected in the same year as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA, 1987), and Next: New Poems (BOA, 1987). In 1996, her collection The Terrible Stories (BOA, 1996), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Among her many other awards and accolades are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frost Medal, and an Emmy Award. In 2013, her posthumously published collection The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA, 2012), was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.