Description
Book SynopsisPlainspoken, 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.”
Tracy K. Smith took a poetry workshop with Lucille Clifton following the death of her mother. The experience was an awakening. Clifton spoke of her own losses, centering not on the ideas of “letting go” or “making peace,” but of sustained communication with the departed. Clifton’s practices included using the Ouija board, or “spirit board,” as she called it, to make contact with the other world. “I sat rapt, envious, hopeful,” Smith writes, “listening to Clifton describe her own initiation into a fierce and forthright form of knowing.” Smith’s selections offer a gateway into the profound, moving, accessible, and useful notions of this essential poet.
The Divining Poets Quotable Deck Series: Elegant, boxed sets of seventy-eight cards à la tarot decks, with oracular quotes from the world’s greatest visionary poets. Each card contains inspiring and provocative lines chosen for seekers to contemplate, memorize, or answer life questions. Complete with a display stand and how-to instructions, this pocket-sized wisdom is perfect for the holiday season
Trade ReviewPraise 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
